Your grandfather—General Sims II—and mine—Robert Bates Straight—were born some thirty years apart. But in photographs, they look like twins. They were lean brown men until they died.
When General II was nine, he was put to the plow with his brothers.
28
Nine
When you were nine, Gaila, we walked every day in the summer, to one of two places: Thrifty Drugstore, for their 99-cent ice cream cones, for which they are famous in southern California; or 7-Eleven, for various flavors of Slurpees. Depending on how hot it was, how much money I had, and who was walking with us, we did this for all of your childhood. A mile each way. Delphine was seven, and Rosette was three. She was still in the stroller. On a night when there were no cousins or friends, just we four, you held your cone of chocolate and said seriously to me, “I’m worried about my SATs. If I don’t get a good score, I won’t get into Kenyon. I want to go to Ohio.”
I tried not to drop my cone. You were not joking. Not at all. You were already planning a life of books and history.
I said, seriously as well, because you deserved nothing less, “Well, you’re the best reader of anyone I know, and that means you should be fine with all the weird word combinations. Your vocabulary will be great. Your comprehension will be fine.”
“But my math.”
“Yeah. I remember my math score. Terrible.”
The four of us on Magnolia Avenue, where we had made our particular history of each block—the Band-Aid sidewalk, where someone had plastered a very large bandage that stayed for years; the letters and arrows in red and white and orange painted by city and cable crews on sidewalks that your grandmother Gabrielle had inventively told you were cryptic witch messages. All I could think was, My daughter is nine, and she’s thinking about college. I brought her that Kenyon T-shirt when she was not yet two, after I did a reading there. She wore it as a nightgown for years, and then an actual shirt. Damn.
Holding our cones, we started talking about words that began with the same letters, the way the SAT tries to confuse you with synonyms and similarities: fervent, feverish, febrile, feral. I hoped that would be preparation for the time being.
My father, when he was nine, was put onto the outside running board of a Model A Ford, because his legs were too short to reach the gas and brake pedals if he were seated, and told to keep his foot on the gas and drive toward the cows scattered in the summer pasture of the Rockies. He helped round up the cattle with the car, hanging his body inside to steer. He was terrified by each turn the car took.
Then, he said, his father told him they had to trap the grizzly bear. The huge bear dangled from the trap like a monster, and he had to stand close and help the men cut down the body.
My mother was nine when her mother became ill with cancer. Bedridden. My mother darned socks and listened for bombs. The Germans had accidentally bombed some areas of Switzerland, one near their village in the Alps. But the Swiss military had built traps at the base of the mountains near the border, caves where tanks and spikes and bombs were hidden, ready to ambush the Germans if they were foolish enough to invade this tiny fierce nation. My mother said that even when she was nine, she knew her people were too crazy for Hitler.
When I was nine, I did nothing remarkable at all. The bookmobile was purchased in 1970, the summer I was nine. Every other week, I walked unaccompanied to the bookmobile, leaving our garden laced by silvery trails I was instructed to follow, to smash with a rock the snails eating the Swiss chard. The bookmobile was parked at the Alpha Beta market for two hours. I arrived at precisely the minute the doors on the converted bus opened and checked out my stack of young adult books. I spent the next hour and a half lying on the carpet, reading completely unsuitable novels by Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie and Ross Macdonald. I walked home thinking about all the ways there were to die, sliding my books carefully under a hole in the chain-link fence before I climbed over, and then crossed the railroad tracks, thinking those two silver lines shone like the marks left by the snails across the earth.
When you were nine, Delphine, you were already the fiercest kid I knew, and you scared the crap out of everyone. You wanted to be an entomologist and pro basketball player. You collected fig beetles and butterflies and moths, and all summer you wore a pale blue sleeveless jersey with the figure of Shaquille O’Neal and matching blue baller shorts that hit below your knees.
You were pissed when we went to France. No one to play ball with in Paris, where we did join you in making fun of the thin legs of French boys, calling them baguettes to cheer you up. We traveled with a filmmaker and her toddler daughter, and stayed out in the countryside of the Drôme, between Lyon and Avignon, in a stone house up in the hills near the villa of the filmmaker’s parents, a painter and his wife.
It is the summer I remember with the most passionate affection of my life as a mother.
Gaila was eleven, and had brought music for us—Foo Fighters, Linkin Park, and 3 Doors Down. (She had begun to educate me about white music, which was funny—I still listened only to the music of my youth, Chaka Khan, Kool & the Gang, Tower of Power.) Rosette was five. She was amazingly cheerful at having to walk up the endless stairways of castles and medieval villages.
We were in the middle of nowhere. Our stone house was small and golden, with sheer white curtains that blew inside with the constant wind of southern France. We had a pool. We ate ice cream. We had watched Knight’s Tale, with Heath Ledger, and the bad guy was French, Count Adhemar, a dude with protuberant eyes and a small mouth; so around the pool when huge biting flies came for us, we shouted Count Adhemar! and leaped into the water. We attracted three French girls your age who were staying half a mile away on their grandparents’ farm. I had a house full of girls, playing Uno in both languages, eating dinner with us, long interludes of chat y souris (cat and mouse) in the foothills, which looked so much like home, chaparral and boulders and leathery sage.
But you were full of wonder, that month you turned nine, even though your birthday party was in the home of strangers—the painter and his wife, on a terrace overlooking the valley. I made butter cake with caramel icing. The sirocco wind came up, just like the Santa Anas at home, and your face transformed.
You were already feeling the traveling bones inside you. We walked for six and seven miles some days, all the way to the village, so you three could see Fatima, the Algerian-born young woman who worked at the café and brought you ice cream and exclaimed over your hair and smiles. She looked like you, and you adored her. Then we walked all the way back up the narrow lane into the hills.
And one day, you were determined, in your blue Shaq jersey, to have white cherries from the trees we’d been passing, and you climbed up and collected some. Then the branch broke and you almost fell. We kept walking, eating cherries, and Rosette found wild garlic, which she carried home like a rare treasure. Gaila and I talked about the plaque we had seen in the village, near the café—the names of the villagers shot in the Resistance. We talked about the films of Marcel Pagnol we had watched again and again—My Mother’s Castle and My Father’s Glory, set not far from where we were. We talked about the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, the hidden passageways we’d seen where queens were murdered by poisoned dresses.
There were cicadas in the Pagnol movies. Delphine, the entolomologist, you were determined to catch a cicada, so we went into a grove of trees to listen. And then, that afternoon I treasure even at this moment because I don’t know how anything will ever be that way again, we saw an old man wearing tall black boots, carrying a burlap sack, and a dog snuffling along the earth among tree trunks.
We were in a grove of white oak trees. He told me in French that he was searching for truffles, that this was his farm. “A truffle farm,” you said in wonder. We stood in the late sun, rays spangled through the oak leaves, the dry stems of grass around the bases of the trunks, and you said, “Someday I want to have a forest like this, and I would grow truffles.”
I stood t
here with Rosette holding my hand, and I was in the orange groves of my childhood, the regimented rows of dark leaf and the water slipping like mercury down the irrigation furrows, over my bare feet. I was in the dark fairy-tale forests of my mother’s childhood, and the forbidding snowy woods of my father’s. We were in France. Gaila said, “I want to work on the truffle farm too!” and Rosette said, “I want to work on the truffle farm and I would take care of the dog!”
The sound of cicadas began to fill the air above us, and you looked up, narrowing your eyes at the bark of a tree.
When you were nine, Rosette, my beloved brother, your uncle Jeff, died. We inherited his favorite chicken: Coco the Mexican Fighting Hen, native of Chihuahua.
Your uncle had lived in a barn on twenty acres of citrus trees, between two ranchos: on one, Little Jose grew palm trees for landscapers, and on the other, Big Jose raised fighting roosters in a hundred tiny enclosures. You walked there with my brother. Fighting roosters are trained to be vicious, but they begin as baby chicks. Coco was matchless as a maternal source for countless fighters.
My brother ended up with Coco, along with some reject fighting roosters that he taught to sit on the couch beside him and eat Doritos while watching Monday Night Football. You remember she stayed in a long narrow wooden pen because of the wild animals that roamed my brother’s grapefruit groves. When he died, his partner told us to come get Coco, so she could live with our other chickens, Butter and Smoke and Chili.
No one had ever caught or touched Coco. She was terrifying. We got her into a cage and brought her to her own coop, separate from all the others. She was small and brown-feathered. We let her out once, and she walked casually over to Butter as if in a movie like Mean Girls or Never Been Kissed, as if Butter were a golden plump cheerleader who said, “Oh, my God, are you the new girl? ’Cause you’re, like, scrawny and brown and your feathers are tragic,” and then Coco was like, “Yeah, and about that, I’m going to kill you now by first pecking out your stupid eyes.”
She flew at Butter with fury like we’d never seen. I had the broom ready, but it was hard as hell to guide Coco back in her coop. I thought she might kill me, too. I’d worn boots and jeans and gloves. I gave her ripe bananas as my brother had. I looked like him. She didn’t have to know I was a girl, too.
She was aloof in her coop. We didn’t take away her eggs. One day I threw her some dandelions, which the other chickens liked. But in the morning, Coco was half-dead, having choked on a long slippery dandelion stem. It lay five inches out of her beak, and she lay limp in the dirt.
You always loved animals more than anyone, Rosette. You were brave enough to do what I asked: I picked up Coco, for the first time, held her against my chest, which was not the hard part, and you stood directly in front of that murderous beak and with your bare fingers pulled the long stem from her throat while she stared at you with those fighting hen eyes. It was petrifying. Then you said, “Oh, God, that’s gross,” and dropped the dandelion and Coco blinked twice and breathed. (She lived to be fourteen.)
Later that year, you told us you wanted to be a casting director. When you were eleven, you began the process of casting the pantheon of Greek mythology, from all the stories we had read for years—all the major gods and goddesses and also the muses and mortals because you wanted a large number of roles. You were casting only black actors and actresses. The summer you turned twelve, you spent hours here at my desk, looking at thousands of images and head shots and biographies. Faces and faces.
You were a loner. You had ideas. You had no trouble with Zeus—Idris Elba; Apollo: Michael Ealy; Aphrodite: Kerry Washington. But you struggled with Hera. Zoe Saldana was too thin. Halle Berry was too sweet. (You did not have Rihanna or Beyoncé in mind yet as actresses—they were still singers.) It had to be Tisha Martin-Campbell, who would talk shit to Zeus and call him out on his affairs with other women.
You knew this kind of audacious. It is in your blood. You had heard it from the woman laughing in the driveway.
29
Al Green—Driveway #1, The Second Love Letter
Riverside, California
The young girls—not just my own daughters, but all the nieces and great-nieces and cousins, maybe thirty girls—look at us like we’re ghosts when Al Green comes on the stereo the men have set up in the driveway, just as the sun is going down and we’re done putting up the rest of the ribs in foil-covered pans, when we who are now the ancestors are sitting in folding chairs with our feet out in front of us because we’ve been on them all day cooking.
Back when we were the young girls, the elders played Etta James and Charles Brown in the driveway. Today, during the afternoon, Nelly and Ciara and Usher blasted from the speakers of a nephew’s car. But when the men want us to get forgiving and misty-eyed, right when we women start to clean up all that food, someone puts on Al Green.
Not electrified drums that shake our ribs, but the sparkly snare drum and organ riff that tap companionably at our sternums—the long bones that cover our hearts. We hear Al Green sing, “I’m Glad You’re Mine.”
Even though most of us are not theirs now, the men on the other side of the yard, we might as well be, because we’re still here, remembering all those cars creeping down dirt roads out past the orange groves, remembering all those nights on the phone, all those house parties where the DJ played Al Green when it got to midnight and it was time to pair up and move more slowly, to have a hand planted on your backbone just where your spine ended.
We are the cartilage of women. Most of us are separated or divorced or widowed. Revia is no longer with Eddie, Shirley never was married to General III. Sitting beside me is Lisa, General III’s first wife; she and I have been Sims family now for forty years; she is remarried, but always comes to gatherings. Teri is widowed, Tina and Christine and Sandra are divorced.
My daughters and the other girls glimpse our faces as Al Green sings about the only thing he sings about—that which transformed us when we were young like they are, when our feet didn’t hurt and we were in darkened living rooms with record players spinning “Call Me” and “Let’s Stay Together.” The only things we cared about back then—“Love and Happiness” and “Let’s Get Married.”
Our faces get softer. Our eyes narrow to slits as we study the men gathered at the huge smoker and the card tables, drinking their Hennessey, slamming down dominoes and hollering. They hear Al Green, too, and they smile, because Al used to work for them.
“Girl,” Sandra says to me, leaning back and folding her hands across her stomach. “Girl, this song used to kill me. Every time. It was this one summer. You know.”
The eight beats—stark and sweet—and then the guitar plaintive and the organ rolling in to make it sacramental. “Love will make you do right, love will make you do wrong.”
We think we did right. We think the men did wrong.
But here we all are, the dishes of macaroni and greens and rice behind us on the tables, our kids playing basketball in the street or bent over car hoods looking at something, the girls walking on the sidewalk with their tight jeans and little tees.
They think we look old. We’re in our forties and early fifties. Like we’re in Lutcher, Louisiana, or Grenada, Mississippi. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Or right here.
Nearly every one of us was born here in southern California. But our parents were born in the South or Mexico (except for me) and between the smells of smoked meat and the sound of Al Green’s voice catching in his throat when he says, “We’ll walk away with victory,” it sounds like church and testifying and that kind of love and loss that the young girls are dubious about. That kind of love seems to come from a place with too many trees and not enough cars, of women sitting not in a fancy club or casino but in a driveway, on folding chairs, with faces melting a little.
It is like church, for us. Al Green wanted to love us and take care of us and take us to church in our own houses, in our living rooms, on our couches, which were not the couches we wanted. We wanted better c
ouches, and less hard work, and the men to stay home and stay married to us, and we loved our children once they were the ones sitting near us on the couch, but when Al Green came on the radio, we still smiled.
I was twelve when “I’m Still in Love” played every hour on my tiny yellow transistor radio that my mother and I got with Green Stamps that summer before junior high. Then I met Dwayne, who slams down a domino now. We learned about the crucible of love at house parties and backyards where Al Green wafted through the pepper trees.
That was the year, 1974, when Al Green’s former girlfriend broke into his house in Memphis and poured boiling grits on him while he was showering, inflicting second-degree burns before she killed herself in an adjacent bedroom with his gun. Older guys used his name as part of the lexicon of love and obsession: “You bet’ not mess with that woman, fool—she look like she can cook some grits. You let her go, she do a Al Green on you, man.”
But they’ve all let us go. When we hear him sing, “For the Good Times,” we don’t care. We had our times, and we would never trade them.
Our daughters stalk toward us and then away. One of them says, “You all look like—”
They don’t know how we look, because they haven’t looked like this yet. I wonder if they ever will—they don’t have house parties and driveways and dances in the gym and in the park. They have cars rolling past, boys studying them, yes, but the voices are blaring X-rated instructions from huge car stereo speakers, rappers that sound to us like their love requires commands given by slightly bored field generals.
Back in our day, there was going to be a bed, or a couch, or a back seat. There was going to be possible disappointment. We revered the love we knew was to come, and even the hurt. Because being hurt was inevitable, we knew from watching our own parents.
In the Country of Women Page 20