Now Gaila is getting her PhD in African-American/American Studies, at University of Texas, Austin. Delphine is getting her PhD in Art History/African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Rosette has just taken a new job with Amazon Studios in Los Angeles.
When I knew none of you would come back here to live, and I cleaned out the bedroom dressers, I found thirty-eight pairs of jeans. The Sisterhood of the Stay-Home Pants. I had never seen many of these jeans. They’d been left behind or traded by the multitudes of girls who slept here, cousins and basketball teammates and school friends and college roommates and neighbors. There are so many sizes, I haven’t bought jeans for six years. Whether I gain or lose weight, I wear the pants of your past.
Everything else can be reduced to ashes—the money, the things men cared about, the houses and cars and hats the men wanted, the dresses and coats and hats the women wanted. The wedding rings they had or didn’t have, never received or lost or took off, wouldn’t burn. Our finger bones will turn to soot. But on Daisy’s corner lot, Dwayne found the bronze doorstop from his childhood. Maybe our brass doorknob, original to my house, would survive. The one that Delphine points out is so loose and twitchy after being touched by hundreds of hands that it can be opened only by the experts: Delphine, Rosette, and me.
I sit every night on this porch, staring at the grass where we used to sleep when it was so hot, where we lay looking up at the sky, the bats, the whoosh of an owl, the blur of night moths, the abrupt midnight songs of mockingbirds.
“You taught us how big the world is, and how small we are.” Delphine, you told me this two years ago, when we walked on Little Sugarloaf, amid the white boulders.
“You always let me read in a corner and didn’t make me wash the dishes right away or talk to people.” Gaila, you told me this when you had found your beloved bench on which to read at Oberlin.
“I was trying to explain to someone how we grew up.” Rosette, you told me this last year, in Los Angeles. “I was like, Wait—what’s below humble?”
When I started writing this book, I typed until two or three in the morning, as if I were someone with much younger eyes, and on the evening after my first draft was done, I was cleaning in the garden—reflexively, genetically incapable of letting the branches and weeds advertise my slovenly weeks of writing, as if my mother might walk up the path. I lifted a big river rock and then I saw a piercing light, like a tracer bullet curving around the edge of my left eye.
I had a detached retina, in exactly the same place as had happened two years ago to my left eye, after I’d worked too hard on a novel. Delphine came home to take care of me. She drove me to the retinal specialist for laser surgery, the pain of which felt like intense green stitching I observed deep inside my brain, my eyes held open by plastic. I recovered sitting in the darkened living room while we watched our favorite television shows. I was berated if I attempted to pull a weed.
Then Delphine went home.
I am here alone, masses of dark retinal debris clouding parts of my vision. In the left eye, the debris is a gray jellyfish that swims back and forth, as if a windshield wiper moves it with my glances. In the right eye, the new debris is two black spiders hovering in the vitreous at the deep right edge of my sight, and then a black chiffon scarf that moves diaphanous over my sight, as if drifting in a gentle wind.
I feel like a failure. I contemplate cleaning the garage. The walls are ridden with termites, my brother’s old workbench filled with his bullets and Dwayne’s, with nails and screws from our former lives. From the rafters hang every Big Wheel, tricycle, training bicycle, and beach cruiser my daughters and nieces and great-nieces have ever ridden.
Then I realize I’m an idiot. I hold six generations in the handlebars of this Big Wheel. Fine and Ruby would marvel at this Big Wheel, and the tiny fingers that once clutched the plastic grips. The hollow wheels made the loudest sound imaginable on the gravel driveway and old sidewalks bordered by yellow irises brought to me the first year we owned this house by General Sims II, and purple irises brought to me by my mother, Gabrielle Gertrude Leu Straight Watson.
Some women considered this the promised land. Once they got here, they never wanted to leave. Daisy and three of her daughters, Callie and both her daughters, and Rosa are all buried or ashes here. Jennie is buried in Los Angeles. Fine’s resting place is Okalahoma, and Ruby’s is Colorado. But they are all with me.
I test my vision in the garden. Restricted to the sidewalk, I see everything close up. I hear a small repeated thump somewhere nearby. A little lizard is trying to leap back out of the metal watering can. Teenager-sized, the length of my thumb. A western blue-throated fringe-toed lizard. I know this because I was a nerd, a kid who identified all lizards, butterflies, beetles, rocks, and wildflowers in notebooks. A loser. My daughters know all the names of these insects and lizards as well, and know to shake out their high heels in the closet, cool cradles of baby lizards like this.
If I weren’t out here right now, being a loser, the reckless teenager would have died in the hundred-degree heat. I tip the can over so the lizard can run into the sunflowers.
Your father comes by once or twice a week, to sit here on the porch, peeling and eating navel oranges from the tree we planted when my brother died. We talk about what we fear for your days and nights, what we hope for your weeks and years, and then he finds comfort in considering what items to deliver or purchase or move for you. (From the swap meet, he buys Kunmi and Andre cell phone accessories, which is a great improvement from eternal suspicion.) We talk incessantly about you girls. We know you might never come home, but we are human, so of course, our hearts race when we think we’ll see your faces. We talk about Daisy Mae, the possum who died only this year, in my basement, having somehow made her way inside again.
When he leaves, I listen to the melancholy finches in the sunflowers. The night will turn to the deep blue of new denim.
All we women have to give you is memory. Everything we washed is there. Everything we cooked. Everything we said.
What we felt we might keep to ourselves, unless someone wrote it down.
Riverside, California, 2000 (Photograph courtesy of Juli Jameson)
Acknowledgments
Trying to thank all our family—blood and biraderi—feels impossible. But here goes:
Sims: John Prexy Sims, Lee Myrtle Sims, Karen and John Lark and family, Teri Andrews and family, Toni Sims Scott; General Roscoe Conklin Sims III, Lisa Bennett, and family; Shirley, Ericka, and Sensei Sims and family; Carnell Sims and family; Christine Sims Stuckey and family; Derrick Sims and family; Angela Sims; Nygia Preston and family; Margaret Chandler Cain and family; Eddie Chandler III and Revia Chandler and family; Rita Butts Sweeney, Anthony “Snooter” Butts, and family descended from Mary Louise Morris Butts; Carolanne Bagley and family descended from Myrtle Morris Samuel Bagley; Rosie Morris; the Wall family; Trent Chatham and all the Chatham and Hamilton family; the Wilson family; the Marshall Anderson and Robert Anderson families; the Aubert family; the Collins family; Dell Roberts and family.
Watson/Leu: John Watson Jr. and family; Chris and Barbara Leu and family; Mark Leu and family; Christine “Stini” Leu; Zoe Watson and Gervais Warren, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.
Swiss Familie Erb, in Oberdiessbach and Aeschlen, especially Beat and Annina, Theodore and Marianne, Hans and Ruth; Lydia Staudenmann and family, Hunibach; Daniel and Anne-Marie Roesti, Wasen in Emmental; Fritz and Susi Kiener, Zwiesselberg.
Straight/Triboulet/Barnaby: Dale Barnaby, Vara Helen “Toots” Barnaby; “Fuzz” Barnaby, Barbara Peary, Dean Straight.
The Jeje family—Oluwatunwamise Jeje, Olubukola Jeje, Ifeoluwakiitan Jeje, for new kin and kindness.
Sisters in the geography of love: Holly Robinson, Kate Anger, Nicole Harris, Tonya Jones, Elizabeth Eastmond, Kari Rohr, Juli Jameson, Dina Lisa Giustozzi, Susan Rae Lakin, Kim Chanta. Douglas McCulloh, honorary Sims; Eleanor Jackson, in the country of mothers; Pat Strachan, Andy Hunter, Wah-Ming Chang, John McGhe
e, Nicole Caputo, Jennifer Kovitz, Megan Fishmann, Sarah Jean Grimm, Elizabeth Ireland, and the Catapult family; Katie Freeman, honorary cousin, and Richard Parks. The writers whose generosity and love carried me all these years, with their own landscapes: Dorothy Allison, Judith Freeman, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Mosley, Karen Tei Yamashita, Alex Espinoza, Tod Goldberg, Stewart O’Nan, Patt Morrison, Jervey Tervalon, Jonathan Gold, Kate Moses, and Carolyn See. And all the people on the campus of the University of California, Riverside, who for thirty years have made family survival possible.
The most love and gratitude, of course, go to the people of my deepest heart: Dwayne Sims, Gaila Sims and Andre LeBlanc, Delphine Sims and Kunmi Jeje, and Rosette Sims.
In Memoriam:
General and Alberta Sims; Robert Sims and Crystal Sims; Stanford Sims; Loretta Preston; Margrett Sims, BJ Green, Corion Green; Lareanz Simmons; Eddie Chandler II and Lucy Segovia Chandler; Maisha Walters; Jesse Wall; Jeannette Sims; Tommie and Judy Chatham; Lewis Gainer Sr.; Floyd and Leonard “LB” Walker; Jesse Lee and Clarice Collins; Doriella Anderson; Waudier Rucker-Hughes; Sterling Stuckey.
Kahla Barnaby; Helen Triboulet Dixon; Galen Barnaby; Ed and Kate Barnaby. Paul and Della Watson, Ronald Watson.
My mentor: James Baldwin.
My father: Richard Dean Straight.
My brother: Jeffrey Paul Straight Watson, who I miss every day of my life. The next book is yours.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Straight has published eight novels, including Highwire Moon and A Million Nightingales. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and received the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Straight’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, Granta, and The Believer. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family.
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