For the first six years of my life, our family portraits were snapshots of Leleti and John smoking cloves and leaning wanly against the abandoned stone and brick architecture of random international cities. My expression always lingered somewhere between distress and hope. I'd be hovering around their knees, the top of my head a few feet below their swanky orbit, staring straight into the self-timed camera, while they cast their eyes anywhere but.
On occasion, their photography won an award or one of John's travel essays scored a grant, and we'd live on that, following its stipulations to the next city or town. I suppose they thought they were bestowing the greatest of gifts, living no-madically, raising me as they wished they'd been raised, as they still seemed to be raising themselves.
But on more instances than I can enumerate, I'd shake the Evan Garde snow globe in my mind and imagine a home where a man with skin the color of pinecones, for all his foibles, managed to hold down a factory job most days and find his way back to his house most nights. His was a nice house. Modest. Two floors and a basement with stacks of books and bottles of water where he'd lock himself in for days to detox. Evan seemed like the type of man who knew how to get his mind right when he needed to. I imagined him consistent, whether bingeing or sober, philandering or faithful.
THE BELTWAY was usually smooth along 1-70 before the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but not in Leleti and John's emerald Cooper import. It wasn't at all like the new Minis. There wasn't any gloss in the finish. It hadn't come fully loaded with the option of a Union Jack embossed on the hood. It took ratty, thin, doughnut tires, and it had a semirusted bike rack melded to the fender. His blue mountain bike and her basketed and tas-seled Huffy Cruiser weighed down the back end of the rickety antique. I hated embarking on any journey with them that couldn't be ended in half an hour. All their road snacks were vegan. The three muffins in the brown paper bag beside me weighed seven pounds.
“Leleti, I need to be back in Seattle by Monday,” I said firmly, watching the sky.
“Yes, Anouk, you've mentioned that twice now,” John retorted, watching the road.
“Have I?” Even if I'd known that, I couldn't have helped it. Leleti and John have no concept of chronos. Sometimes, you've got to give them a nudge or twelve.
“If you're so hung up on a schedule, why didn't you drive yourself?” Leleti always pronounced schedule the British way. It really pissed me off.
“You know why.”
I was up to my ears in college loan debt and I couldn't afford to keep a car in Seattle. I'd sold mine before starting the two-year poetry M.F.A. program in Seattle that Leleti and John called “soul-sucking and pointless” when I showed them my acceptance letter.
They'd been painting at the time, painting in matching denim overalls, though the denim was barely visible under the broad splats of olive and orange paint soaking into it. They'd been laughing and kissing and flicking the excess from their brushes onto each other. I'd used my key to get in, instead of knocking. They don't like it when I do that. They say it's because they value their privacy and because there are some things they'd just rather I didn't interrupt. Whenever they say that, I ask them, “When am I not interrupting?” And while that's the point in the conversation where most parents would be reassuring and say something like “Of course you're not a burden! We love you! Drop by anytime!” even if they didn't mean it, Leleti and John tend to keep quiet when I ask them that.
That day, in response to their silence, I remember being tired. I remember staring down at the letter, then back up at them. I remember it taking only a second to decide I wouldn't be back to see them for at least two years.
This trip didn't count. This wasn't about them. This was about them being a means to an end. I wanted them to ferry me to family who wouldn't try to section me out of their lives with an invisible velvet rope.
Sometimes I think Leleti chose John to compensate for there being so little Evan in her upbringing. His absence made her long for the ability to exclude. She wanted someone she could gather to herself, someone who wouldn't mind shutting everyone and everything else out in order to have her. John was just that kind of guy When he met her, his only attachments in the world were to his parents, and he was all too happy to sever those ties for the promise of a life with Leleti.
Leleti and John met on a Black college campus in 1976. His parents were prerevolutionaries—SNCCers and Panthers before there were SNCCers and Panthers—who'd attended Tuskegee and Bethune-Cookman. Gramsy who'd put herself through college in the sixties just after Leleti was born, was just a firm advocate of a good Black education. So of course they wanted Howard University for their children, because it was touted as the best historically Black college in the country and thus the only suitable choice for the second-generation nationalists they were trying to groom. Neither Leleti nor John seemed to appreciate these parental desires. Leleti had her heart set on expatriation. John was less interested in Howard or Morehouse or Meharry than in Oxford or the Sorbonne or the Peace Corps.
Their mothers would have no such scheming. Leleti's was hoping that the child would find a husband at Howard, a man “as fine and fearless as Huey Newton—but dipped in a much darker chocolate.” John's mama had already tried to arrange his marriage to a girl John's father represented at an arraignment for her participation in a violent civil rights protest.
Later, when Gramsy finally met John's mom, the two could do nothing but cluck and complain about the inauspicious match over separate soul food dinners.
By their sophomore year Leleti and John were sipping imported beer in Adams Morgan and staying on for the second and third sets of way-past-campus-curfew performances. Their all-time favorite band was called The Liberia Kightlinger Trio, fronted by a curvy woman so dark that only her crimson nails on the microphone distinguished her from the darkness in the seedy, smoke-filled dives she played. According to them, Liberia Kightlinger, with her Afro wide as an LP and her closed eyelids hiding iridescent sclera and indigo irises, played plenty of instruments but was best known for the sitar. On particularly maudlin numbers, she would strum a mandolin with bare, raw fingers and Leleti and John would hold their breath, letting whatever Liberia felt soak into them like rain.
After the sets, they'd buy her drinks and they came to be known as her “groupie couple.” She told them about Brazil and how it was just as color-conscious as America, so they'd do well to concentrate their travels elsewhere, when they finally got around to the sojourn.
THE MINI took the broad turnpike curves sharper than most modern vehicles would have. John was a notorious speeder. It was one of his unspoken contradictions. He was the picture of calm, slow to react, quick to soothe—well, quick to soothe Leleti, anyway—and yet here he was careening rather recklessly up the highway, randomly swerving and hitting his brakes, oblivious to the strain it may have been putting on his passengers. Whenever we approached a turn, and I wasn't holding on to the pocket on the back of Leleti's seat, I was tossed to, fro, and onto the floor. I wanted to yell something, but I couldn't figure out what.
“Watch it!” maybe?
Another option: “Urn, hi. This is your daughter. Precious cargo? Yeah, this is the third time you've knocked me onto the floor.”
Or the obvious but never voiced: “You really just don't care, do you?”
D'Angelo's cover of “Girl, You Need a Change of Mind” was blaring through my headphones, so I was probably too loud when I called out, “Did anybody ever get in touch with Gramsy to tell her Evan died?”
I knew the mention of Gramsy had the potential to make things even tenser between Leleti, John, and me, but I couldn't help it. Gramsy had been away on a weeklong retreat in the mountains when Leleti got the news. No wi-fi, room phones, or television were allowed up there. It was perfectly understandable that she hadn't found out about Evan yet. But I still thought it was weird that we were off laying her once-love to rest and she had no idea he wasn't still out here, vaguely alive, as she'd last remembered him.
John gave Leleti's arm a little squeeze as she pinched the bridge of her nose and sighingly answered, “No, Anouk. She still doesn't know.”
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I remember staring at one of Liberia Kightlinger's album covers. In the photograph, she was wearing a psychedelic minidress—violet and orange and electric blue. Her thick legs were gapped, forming an upside-down V, and four-inch heels cradled and lifted her slender feet. She stood at the center of a near-empty dance floor, where three or four dancers shimmied under a massive strobe light. Oblivious to the disco vibe of it all, Liberia Kightlinger leaned down to bang her flat palm against the djimbe drum positioned between her calves.
I thought Liberia Kightlinger was the type of woman who might've caught Evan Garde's fancy. Sometimes I watched him strut into the background of that album cover, walking through the door behind her and wrapping his thumb and forefinger around her tiny wrist. I thought of him pulling her away from the drum and toward the edge of the dance floor. It was the kind of move I thought he might've pulled with any of his children's moms. Before a single song had a chance to finish playing, Liberia was smitten, pressing her back into Evan's broad chest, grazing her fingers over his downy arms as they folded themselves around her waist. He'd grin and nestle his stubbled chin on her shoulder. But when I'd lean in closer to look at this animated scene, Liberia's face would start to shine with tears, anticipating the heartbreak that usually followed Evan's arrival.
In his prime, Evan was the kind of womanizer for whom demurring seemed entirely overrated. He didn't bother with the hard-to-get chicks … but then again, there weren't many women he considered hard to get. He'd sired six children by the time he was thirty-four to a myriad of mothers. When he slowed down, settling in with a third and final wife around the time he turned forty, he had two more. Restraint was a concept he'd learn in old age.
“WILL WE BE STOPPING anytime soon?” I wondered.
“We need to make it up the road apace, Anouk,” John calmly pointed out.
“I realize that, John, but we've passed at least six rest stops—even Breezewood. We always stop in Breezewood.”
At night, Breezewood was dazzlingly neon, and most of the fast-food eateries popular in every region of the U.S. (Pizza Hut. Domino's. Starbucks. KFC. McDonald's and Burger King. Krispy Kreme. Taco Bell) were crammed into the space of a half mile. I liked the homogenized nature of it all, how unremarkable the choices were, how man-made the landscape. Breezewood made more sense to me than Sicily or Senegal because it was entirely beyond exoticism and thus held no pull for my parents. Strange, but I felt closer to them there. Vegan though they were, they'd always pull into the visitors’ center parking lot and take me to Dairy Queen. They'd slide into a booth on the long seat opposite me and watch sort of curiously as I ate an Oreo blizzard. This was the only ritual we shared, the only thing I did that was certain to hold their attention. I relished it, even if all they were thinking behind their wrinkled noses and unreadable smiles was: This girl is nothing like us.
I bet they'd decided, long before I got there, that this time they'd unceremoniously end the whole charade, that watching me eat ice cream wasn't fascinating at all, that my being nothing like them was really nothing to celebrate.
JOHN GLANCED AT ME in the rearview mirror. “Anouk, whatever you want to stop for I'm pretty sure you can hold in.”
I was tired of holding things in. But he was right. We'd left our Dairy Queen behind hours ago, I didn't have to pee, and as long as the two-ton muffins beside me remained untouched, I wasn't going to starve. As usual, my wishes held no urgency. I slumped into the space behind Leleti and turned my iPod up to maximum volume.
ON THE FEW OCCASIONS WHEN i had seen Evan Garde, he tended to regard my mother with starry eyes, like dewy blankets of night pinpricked with sparkles. That night never cast its cover on me. If he looked at me at all, it was an afterthought. I'd never gotten more than a glance, a wry smile, a stray question here or there for which he'd never awaited my answer. I laid eyes on him in person four times. I was seven the first time, then twelve, then sixteen, and then there was just last summer. I was twenty-five.
That last visit was the one where it began to sink in that access to my grandfather's other family—-Wife Three and their two children (three years older and six years younger than I)—may have been something I desperately needed. I was nothing like Leleti and John. Aside from that year in middle school when I shaved one side of my head and dyed the other side platinum blond and listened to nothing but David Bowie, there's been little evidence that any of their traits have rubbed off on me. I had to resemble someone. I might've eerily resembled one of Evan's other offspring, but how would I have known it? Growing up, Leleti had spent a little time with a few of her siblings here and there, but she hadn't kept it up into adulthood. By the time I was born, she rarely talked about them, and visits were even more scarce, so it was easy to forget she had brothers and sisters at all. Maybe their absence was as detrimental as iron deficiency. Now my relationship with them was anemic.
Evan's newest nuclear family was a cluster of strangers. But last summer, sitting in the living room, sipping cold Pepsi from thick glass bottles and listening to them talk eagerly, expectantly to Leleti, they were also family. Especially Evan, because during that visit, for the first time ever, he and I locked eyes.
“Excuse me,” he said every few minutes, staring full on at me. “This here nicotine's callin’ my name.”
I grinned like an idiot byway of response, flummoxed that he'd spoken directly to me at all.
He returned just moments later, his crisp plaid shirt smelling of Wisk and lawn and Marlboros. This happened a few times. He'd look at me, excuse himself, and head out back for a smoke. Then he'd come back just in time to latch on to the end of an anecdote his wife was telling Leleti. When Leleti laughed, so did he, hearty and hopeful. He might have even interjected something, though I can't remember any specific thing he said. I only know that every time he spoke, I laughed like I was listening to stand-up. And then he'd look over at me and I'd catch a constellation shimmering in his dark eyes. I saw the gleam of Cassiopeia as he grinned sheepishly and said only to me, “Pardon me. I'm ‘bout to go on out for a cig.”
I was surprised at how much I wanted to follow him then. I didn't. I sat close to Leleti instead, silently clasping the cold curves of the soda bottle, listening to Leleti talk to all these people as though she really knew them.
“Wonder what happened to Filene,” she mused.
“Giiiiirl,” one of her sisters interjected, and the rest of her family would bring twenty years of scandal up-to-date in all of fifteen minutes.
My twenty-year-old uncle, Devin, was the only person who stopped in the middle of all the clamor to notice me. “She's pretty,” he said, audibly but also to himself, since no one responded. I think I should've said thank you. I should've said something to let him know I was grateful for the acknowledgment. Or I could've reciprocated his observation with one of my own. Devin was handsome and magnanimous, secretive and modestly brilliant. I'd seen the seeds of that when he was a little boy, and I had an anecdote to prove it. Maybe if I'd shared it, he would've stuck around instead of flipping up the hood on his Central Michigan sweatshirt, excusing himself from the chatter, and bounding out the front door.
Evan would be back by the end of family gossip session and he'd laugh and say something like, “Sho’ did!” I'd giggle at his exclamation until they all turned quizzical eyes on me and I realized I was the outsider.
THE CAR JERKED and tossed me back and forth against a hard spring jutting through the worn leather seat. John was stroking Leleti's hair as she hummed absently and turned her head to the window so he wouldn't coo over her tears.
I was still the outsider.
Sighing and lifting one muff from my ear, I asked, “Are you okay up there, Leleti?”
“She's fine,” John commented, quietly. “How about you? How are you holding up?” I saw him clench his jaw, like it was an
effort to ask. Just two days before, John called to convince me to stay in Seattle. When I picked up the phone, he just launched into a kind of breathless monologue about the cost of cross-country travel and the days of class I might have to miss before ending, flustered, with “I just—I just think it would be best for you to stay on at school.”
Leleti pulled her gaze from the window and stared at the side of her husband's face. “She didn't really know him,” she answered.
John shot her a look and then fixed his gaze a hundred feet ahead at the sharp curl of the road. I don't know why I expected him to defend me against that comment, but I did. I'd always secretly figured that if I had any shot at all at penetrating their Teflon exclusivity, I'd find my inroad in John. He was the quieter of the two, and when you got him alone, he'd sometimes betray some small interest in the things you had to say. The right lane would end soon, up where John's eyes were cast, but he made no move to veer into the left one. I guess he figured he didn't have to. It was the middle of the night. We were alone out there.
I shrugged, feigning nonchalance and failing. “That's true, Leleti. I didn't.” I let the earphone snap back to my ear.
THE PROBLEM with hipsterism, other than its insistence on glorifying the obscure, is the unwritten rule that hipsters must always be moody and brooding and misunderstood. The problem with being raised by hipsters is that they're incapable of overcoming their self-absorption long enough to parent.
Leleti and John were like this single, fused, impenetrable entity. They weren't so much like a mother and father as they were like older twin siblings with a secret language and secret hopes and secret plans. I think they were truly elated when I turned eighteen. I moved right out. They didn't ask where I was going. They weren't the kind of parents who followed you to orientation to make sure you weren't headed to a party school. They were the kind who just handed over their tax information for FAFSA and told you you were on your own.
It's All Love Page 32