“Electrical tape,” I said.
“Yeah. Then he said, ‘G, bring me some water.’”
I laughed. “You’re slow,” I said. “Didn’t you realize what your dad wanted?”
She shook her head.
Oh, our early days of marriage, our old broken-down cars—the Fiat, the Toyota truck, the Bronco—each of which required hours of Dwayne’s time under the hood. In the gravel driveway, in the driver seat trying to write a novel in a notebook, every few minutes he would ask me to do something. “Start it up. Rev the engine. Push down on the brake pedal. Okay.”
Really, he wanted my company. I used to grade papers on the steering wheel, too.
“He just wanted you to sit out there with him,” I said.
She sighed. “Well, I had homework. Then he called me again and said, ‘G, listen.’ He turned the music up real loud and I heard Kanye.”
When he came by the next afternoon, I said, “Thanks for the stereo.” He handed me a small silver figure with a clip. It was an angel holding a scroll that read, “Drive safely, Daughter.”
“I got this at the swap meet too,” he said. “Put it on the visor, okay?”
“I will,” I said. “You know she named the car. Thelma.”
“What? Thelma? For Thelma and Louise?”
“Maybe,” I said.
When he left, he hesitated by the red Honda for a moment, and nodded his head.
We had Thelma until Delphine one night drove a boyfriend home, and while they were inside talking to his mother someone stole the old Honda. It was found in San Bernardino days later, completely stripped. Dwayne and I went to the tow yard, and I drove Thelma back along the old highway below the Cajon Pass. The thieves had taken the entire interior, but not the engine. I was actually sitting on the bare metal floor of the car, with the freeway visible in the gaps between the missing door panels, the missing console, the missing windows allowing the winter rain to hit my face. Behind me were empty fast-food bags; the thieves had eaten dinner while removing the seats. I pulled slowly off the freeway and into the driveway, where Thelma stayed home for a few weeks. Then Dwayne went to Pick-a-Part, the massive automobile junkyard in a canyon just past the rock my father gave me, where people like us dig through piles of wrecked cars for what we need. He found the right seats, the right windows, and a center console, so Delphine could drive again.
26
The Yard Couch
Riverside, California, 2008
“She thinks she’s all Pemberley,” Gaila whispered to me, seeing a mother at our high school basketball game, and I smiled.
“But she’s all about Lucas Lodge,” I whispered back.
Even though we did not live in Jane Austen’s England, and even though my daughters were not yet married (given that they were seventeen, fifteen, and eleven), and I did not spend my time searching for future husbands for them, or for me, and even though this was the land of huge SUVs inching down crowded freeways with cell-phone-wielding mothers glaring and toddlers watching in-seat DVD players, my girls and I maintained a complicated system of analysis and judgment for our rather broad society.
It was complex and ever-changing, far bigger than what most daughters and mothers could conceive because we had a massive black and mixed-race family wherein people knew everyone, and a quirky, deeply embedded white family wherein my brother and his friends had painted hundreds of houses, and he’d delivered his cannabis cash crop to many more. We knew our southern California cities as comprehensively and intimately as Edith Wharton knew her New York, and we’d read not only The Age of Innocence but memorized much of the movie version; we’d read The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. We knew our homeland as Louisa May Alcott knew Concord and environs. To tease poor Rosette when she talked about fads like MySpace, Gaila imitated Amy saying, “Limes are all the fashion, Jo!”
But Jane Austen was our favorite right then, because we had gone to Bath, and visited three of the houses where Austen wrote her novels; we’d learned the social hierarchies of money and class and what women were not allowed to believe about themselves in Britain then. We’d seen huge country estates like Pemberley, and smaller houses like Lucas Lodge; we’d walked along Hadrian’s Wall and talked about the Romans and the Saxons.
When we came home, we watched all the movies made from Austen’s novels. So though we said these things only to a few friends, we often made fun of people based on Pride and Prejudice, though elements of Sense and Sensibility and Emma featured now and then. We dined with more than four and twenty families, in a sense, given our involvement in Girl Scouts, high school basketball, French honor society, prom, and college recruitment.
We’d learned in Bath that it took only $10,000 back then to be considered a man of fortune. In California now, that wouldn’t buy a garden shed or a Toyota Camry, the carriage of mothers like Mrs. Bennet.
Our bungalow would have been a cottage; we knew which girls lived as the Bennett sisters, and which mothers aspired to guys like Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy. We laughed at the pretensions of McMansions in new neighborhoods. A mean horrible mother who lived in Netherfield Park tried to go big-dog on our intellectual pursuits, our clothes, and my dusty green Mercury Villager with the magenta stripe. Some girls didn’t like that my daughters played on the car stereo Chamillionaire and early Beyoncé, and some girls rolled their eyes when my daughters played Cake and Cold War Kids. We spent a lot of time talking about noblesse oblige, nouveau riche, and strange French terms that apply so aptly to American culture, especially bourgeois, which our Sims family had employed for decades when someone thought she was all that: So damn boujee!
In summer, we would heave the porch couch from its winter home near the front door, where the winter sun fell just right for naps, and onto its summer home, four pebbled paving stones set on the lawn under the Raywood ash tree. The couch, then ten years old, would remain there in state until the first rains of November.
The yard couch was dark blue with multicolored flowers that seemed mythical and not native to anywhere but fabric. I bought it when my girls were small, and dark colors seemed like a good idea in case of stains. But there were never any stains. They loved that soft couch with a passion, and countless children and teens slept on it. So when I bought a new cream-colored couch one June, actually to impress a few Lucas Lodge mothers who were holding a French club meeting at my house, my girls and their friends protested vehemently. When they said, “Can we just keep the old couch outside for a week? It’s summer!” I gave in.
At first I was mildly embarrassed, even if the flowers kind of blended in with my garden. At least the couch wasn’t plaid or nubby wool. But it was in the tradition of the driveway—where truck benches, black pleather couches, and Naugahyde love seats all had their time.
The summer before Gaila went to college, “the outdoor room” was the thing. Ads for upscale outdoor furniture were relentless, making me mildly resentful. It was not enough to have redwood tables, plastic-strap gliders, and metal chaise lounges with puffy oilcoth cushions, though that’s what I grew up with. (No feeling like peeling your sweaty legs from oilcloth.) We saw elaborate curtained gazebos, wicker and teak furniture, coffee tables, rattan rugs, and actual outdoor chandeliers.
We had weathered wooden chairs sold to me by a Roma family that comes by every June bearing homemade unstained furniture in their pickup truck. Most houses on my block have these redwood chairs, in varying shades of gray, because this is the street of peasants who work for Pemberley, and we are too tired to paint and stain outside furniture. We have the redwood picnic table and benches my mother handed down to me twenty years ago. She bought them in 1958, for her first patio when she was a young married woman in Glen Avon.
My children find it hilarious that the picnic table is older than I am by two years.
My mother hates the fact that the couch is outside for the third year, and all that portends.
For Gaila’s June birthday party, we bought a $9.99 cotton tableclo
th for the ancient picnic table, two new cotton cushions ($4.99 each) for the grayed redwood chairs, and four strands of outdoor lights ($9 each) for the trees. It took about two hours total for the transformation.
It’s not an outdoor room. It’s our front yard.
We have about six yard parties every year, with more than a hundred people for the big ones. These are not Netherfield garden parties. I do have immense borders of perennial flowers and roses. But our parties—Easter potluck, three birthdays, Fourth of July, and Christmas open house—feature foosball and ping-pong. For Gaila’s eighteenth birthday, an actual bounce house, as if for children, but standing guard outside with a cheap cigar was Mr. Sims, making sure no boys acted a fool. Sodas in an old green plastic turtle sandbox, now filled with ice, hilarious to Gaila’s friends. A boombox on the porch. (Speakers? A decent stereo system? So much trouble . . .) And under the tree, the couch where five or six kids crowded on.
The week before, Gaila and Delphine had gone to a party at Netherfield. A brand-new custom home on a hill, where the elaborate landscaping included a copper firepit blazing on top of a fountain, which I found hard to visualize, surrounded by formal furniture and rugs, a manicured putting green, and a saltwater pool.
The next morning, she described the yard while I made pancakes. “All the work it would take to do that,” I said. “And all the concrete and building materials from the old yard having to go to the landfill.”
“We’re so green,” Rosette said, smug because we were eating eggs from our chickens and blackberries from our yard.
But I realized suddenly why our carbon footprint was so small. “That’s because I’m way too lazy to renovate.”
“We are incredible slackers,” Gaila said.
I’d have to drive to a big store, walk around and look at stuff, and then buy it and get someone to drag it home—probably Dwayne in his truck, since he ate here in the yard so frequently. But he couldn’t actually barbecue here, since we’d been divorced for ten years by then. That might be too weird for the Lucas Lodge people, kind of publicly odd if everyone saw him holding tongs and joking around. Then we’d have to assemble things, and find room for them, and clean them.
“Wait,” Gaila said suddenly. “It’s not just that we’re lazy. We’re like the Marches, in Little Women. We think this is okay, to not care. We think this is a good thing.”
“I guess,” I said, stirring. “I guess we’re kind of transcendentalist.”
“Wait,” she said again. “It’s not just that. We have absolutely no pride.”
“What?” I said.
“Look at what I’m wearing.” She was wearing a red checked sundress I’d seen all last year on her friend. They’d traded.
“Look at your bowl.” The mixing bowl holding pancake batter was bought for me by my mother, when I was a newly married twenty-two. I wish it appeared heirloom-like, but the burnt-orange color, wheat motif, and Kmart origin made that impossible. I use it almost every day, even though I still don’t like it.
“That’s why we’re green,” Gaila said. “We just don’t care enough.”
Most things in our house, except those couches, were inherited: the dining room table, the small golden oak side table, with graceful curved legs, that Daisy Carter bought from the Sears catalog in the 1930s. Other things Dwayne had found on the street. Our ancestors survived Reconstruction and Depression, war, race riots, prejudice, and near starvation. We survived the 1970s with those parents. The girls had survived our thrift, college poverty, and an unwillingness to cease finding discarded treasure on a curb. The week before Gaila’s birthday, Dwayne showed off three ladders and a 1970s casket-like deep freezer, and our girls rolled their eyes and said, “Oh, my God, Dad, please don’t tell us where you found them.” They’re good metal ladders. He’ll probably drop one off to me when the girls aren’t here. I turned down the freezer.
Our eldest daughter was right. Ours was a strange California transcendentalism which never fit in with American upward mobility, or impressing anyone.
But this absence of pride was always tempered with my nostalgia, which I kept hidden. I loved that picnic table because my brothers and I used to eat there. My brother, Jeff, had recently died, and my half-brother John moved to another state fifteen years ago. I had never seen my five foster siblings again, but I could remember all of us at the redwood table with our cupcakes and hats. I remember their eyes and their teeth and their laughs. I loved that couch because of all those teenagers who slept on it, their faces for once at rest from the studying and arguing and worrying at which they excelled. I loved seeing them every summer, sprawled and laughing, their faces aglow from the new strand of lights that I affixed to the branches of the Raywood ash with leftover kite string I found in a drawer, wrapped around a popsicle stick by Dwayne ten years before when we used to fly kites with the girls, the string waiting for resurrection.
27
Grizzly
Riverside, California (Tulsa, Oklahoma; Fraser, Colorado)
On her birthday and on Christmas, I left ham and homemade tiger butter candy at Alberta’s grave. I felt the same pleasure as she had, when I bought and carried home a haunch of meat and spread it with spices and honey. You three girls liked to poke whole cloves into the skin. You helped me pull off the leathery brown collar around the bone. The smell of salted pork is probably inside the old lath-and-plaster walls, after all these years, even though I haven’t cooked a ham in a long time.
You three became vegetarians, and even vegan for a time. On Memorial Day, August Family Reunion, and Labor Day, the uncles would say, “Ain’t no such thing as a black vegetarian.” They couldn’t believe you didn’t want ribs or hot links. And on the way home from the gatherings, Gaila said, “Seriously, Mom, everything we ate had meat in it. I thought there was gonna be meat in the fruit salad.”
Your dad and Uncle Trent and Uncle Eddie bought more than a hundred pounds of chicken, hot links, hot dogs. Pork ribs like huge xylophones on the oil-drum grill. When they came off, Uncle Carnell’s wife, Marcella, and I cut them apart with hatchets.
You know the side dishes by heart. You have eaten them since you could walk. Barbecued beans with ground beef, green beans with bacon and salt pork, black-eyed peas with neckbones and salt pork, collards with softened ham hock floating amid the tangled ribbons of green. My dirty yellow saffron rice with black beans and lots of hot red-pepper sausage.
There was no meat in the ambrosia or the potato salad, but you all were suspicious.
“Practically everyone in our family is worried about high blood pressure,” Gaila said.
“So much pork,” Rosette said.
You all knew what I’d say. “We have meat because no one had any in the old days.”
Meat was our means of displaying survival, and prosperity, and pride. While everyone stripped the soft flesh from the ribs, holding the bones aloft like gleaming instruments, you girls had always listened to the elders.
I remember when I was not an elder.
Super Bowl Sunday, maybe 1981, before we were married. I was still an unknown quantity at Uncle Bobby’s house in Inglewood, which your dad and I thought palatial, with the most beautiful bathroom of maroon and gray tile from the 1940s. Your dad still talks about that bathroom. Super Bowl had a fixed menu: Uncle Bobby and his wife, Lee Myrtle, made spaghetti with ground beef; pigs’ feet; chicken wings; and side dishes.
All the Sims brothers were there: Stanford, who lived in Watts; John, who lived off Crenshaw in South Los Angeles; and your grandfather General II. The men sat holding their plates, glancing at the football game, and someone said, “No, man, coon was the worst. You had to hang it up for two days, and then boil it with salt water. Those animals that eat meat themselves, that’s the worst.”
Someone else said, “Possum. Possum was the worst. It just looked nasty. You had to parboil that first with vinegar, before you roasted it. Then you had to put all those sweet potatoes around it just to make it seem like it was good.”<
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“Rabbit. I hated rabbit. I hated hittin’ them in the head. And they kicked you. Kicked you hard. Cut you up.”
Your grandfather went last. He said, “The worst was squirrel. You had to shoot twenty of them suckers to make a meal. And all we ever got was the bones, anyway. Pickin’ out those bones from every bite. You didn’t get any meat for all that work.”
I never forgot those voices, in the elegant living room with a bay window. Your grandfather said, “By the time we left Oklahoma, there were no animals left! We shot them all. We shot so many squirrels the snakes started showin’ up hungry!”
I tell you this because I was a small white woman, the only white person in the house, and Uncle John saw me listening intently. He said, “She must think we’re crazy, talking like this about killing.”
I thought for a moment. Then I said, “My father told me the worst thing he ever ate was grizzly bear. He said it was fatty and greasy and full of worms and it made him sick.”
These men, who had never made me feel unwelcome for a moment, stared at me in silence. Then someone said, “Damn, who eats a bear?”
I did not tell the rest of the story my father had told me. In the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the bear that had been eating his father’s sheep, the jaws of the terrible trap and the silvery grizzly hanging dead in the tree and my father being made to help cut it down and cut it up and haul the awful stinking worm-ridden flea-pocked flesh down the steep forest trail. He was nine.
I told them my father’s family also ate the older sheep that starved to death during the Dust Bowl. The sheep had eaten cactus. Mutton, he called that meat.
“Yeah. Mutton,” Uncle John nodded. “Terrible stuff.”
The football game roared. Our plates were loaded with meat falling off the hooves of pigs, chicken wings with delicate bones. Then your grandfather said, “Well, that sounds about as bad as it gets. Who knew white people had it so hard?”
In the Country of Women Page 19