Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  The trees made a nearly impenetrable wall along the road, behind the canal, until a wrought-iron gate appeared in a gap. If a person wasn’t looking, he’d miss it. The gate was eight feet tall, with SARRAT in letters across the top, just like a plantation or cattle ranch.

  My father had his friend make those letters, in 1965, the year I was born. A man from New Orleans, who used to do wrought-iron balconies and fences.

  When we were young, my father actually locked the gate at midnight. The teenage boys who wanted to buy a car from my brothers or fight them over a girl, or the men always trying to sleep with Claudine—Bettina’s mama—encountered the huge padlock.

  My father assumed anyone who came that late would steal something. A truck, crates of oranges, or a teenager who didn’t need to leave Sarrat. Only the adults who lived in Sarrat had keys.

  But now all of us were grown, and we came and went, and my brothers were the feared men whose cars or money no one wanted to steal. I turned in to the lane and stopped on the wooden bridge over the canal. The water slid silently beneath me. About thirty feet from the bridge, four paving stones were lined up along the canal bank—where we used to sit to dry off. A small shirt hung like a blue flag in the branches nearby, and a juice pouch sat like a little metal teepee. The kids had been swimming today.

  The Corsica rolled slowly down the gravel road inside the hallway of ancient Valencias. The irrigation furrows between the trees were dark and damp. My father had run the water on this section. Someone would be outside, listening to my wheels popping small rocks, wondering if it was Victor, or whoever they had sent out for more ice or beer, or the police.

  Even as they were talking and laughing, they were listening. That was how we came up.

  The second language. On my face, I felt the air that comes through citrus leaves. The air scented with white blossoms, with orange rind and oil, loud and vibrating with bees, stinging with soot during a freeze.

  How I came up. How they do.

  At the end of the lane, my father and brothers left an open space covered with gravel for people to park their trucks and cars. It was so they wouldn’t get caught in the mud in winter, but also so whoever was out on the porches could see who was coming.

  One day when I was ten, I hid under a huge old tree to finish my book and avoid hanging up laundry. It must have been spring, because the side of the barn was covered in wisteria like fat purple icicles, and my mother’s house was covered with morning glory and star jasmine. I was reading Island of the Blue Dolphins. So when the police car came rolling up the gravel, the radio spitting names out the open windows, I froze in my dark spot under a skirt of branches.

  “I thought we were looking for a nigger,” the younger cop said. He had sideburns like little brown ladders beside his ears. “Alphonse Griffin.”

  “Yeah.” The older cop looked down at something on his lap, and then ducked his head to look out the windshield. He had mirror sunglasses like a TV cop, and a hairy wrist resting on the window frame. “Look at this place. Like a picture postcard. You got the oranges and the flowers and the big white house. And look right there who’s waitin for us. Nothin but boons.”

  “Boons?”

  The older man shrugged. “Boons, coons, jigaboos, burrheads. All the same.”

  “You know what my grandma used to call them, when we were in Wisconsin? She used to send money to the starving kids in the South. She called em our dusky brethren.”

  The older cop looked at my parents’ house. “I been here once before. They look Mexican, but they’re niggers. Alphonse Griffin—just another nigger.” Then he put the car in drive. I remembered it so vividly—the engine shifted forward like it was a caged animal taking a big gulp of air. “What a waste of real estate,” the old cop said, and then he went down the road to the houses so fast that gravel popped into the leaves around me.

  Alphonse was always in trouble, but when she was sixteen, Bettina idolized him. She named their son Alfonso. Now I stood against the Corsica and listened. Clarette’s minivan was parked here, and on the other side Cerise’s red Miata. Women talking, kids playing. No men’s voices. They were down at the barn. But if the Navigator had come through here, everyone had seen them. I picked up the photo of Glorette and Hattie. Brown sugar. Sweet voodoo. I couldn’t hand this to Unc Gustave or my father without an explanation of everything that had led up to this moment, to Victor riding with Jazen and Alfonso. Not with me.

  I put the photo back on the seat, but Glorette stared at me, stricken, waiting for me to talk to her. To help her.

  I felt like a superstitious child—here in this grove where I had once been a superstitious child—but I propped the photo on the backseat so their faces looked out, and then picked up my bag and the messenger bag I’d bought for Victor. Even with the two books inside, it felt light and empty, like an old snail shell.

  “The hell—you here already?”

  I dropped the phone and my bag onto the gravel. Cerise came around the side of the van, grinning. “Don’t even start that shit,” I said, brushing off the phone.

  “I didn’t start it.” She was still smiling. Her hair in a huge puffy bun on top of her head, her freckles larger than when we were kids in Kelly Cloder’s pool.

  I propped my butt onto the hood, and she opened the passenger door and sat in my car with her legs stretched out before her. “Who you hiding from?” I asked.

  “I ain’t hidin. Just them kids. They never get tired, and it’s so damn hot. Been hot for days.” She pointed to two plastic bags near her front tire. “I went out for Otter Pops and more Coke.”

  Children’s voices flew like sparrow chatter from my mother’s front yard. I remembered the sweet hard stick of ice we’d all chewed on, every summer.

  Not only did I not have kids, no one I knew in LA had them. No one in my apartment complex, none of the writers I worked with at the magazines or the Times.

  Cerise opened my glove compartment and said, “What you call yourself listenin to now?” She pulled out two CDs. “Uh-huh. Vivaldi. Sarah Vaughan.” She shook her head.

  Victor had tickets to Dave Matthews. I looked down the aisle of night between the trees. Cerise said, “I can’t do it. I tried, when you first showed me. But I can’t listen to somethin with no words, and I can’t listen to them old voices.”

  I didn’t want her to look into the backseat and see Glorette and Hattie. I said, “I brought you a new Vogue.”

  Cerise said, “I just ain’t got the time, Fantine. Your stories make me think, and I got all this laundry or work. I look at em quick and tell your maman where you been.”

  We walked down the gravel. “I didn’t see Victor at sundown. He made it back yet?” I said casually, and she shook her head.

  “You saw Marcus, huh? I remember when we were seniors, way y’all carried on, I thought that was gon be you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.” His arms around me earlier. The baby that wasn’t a baby.

  I thought how no one I knew now in LA could translate that sentence. Carry on. Is that you, girl?

  Always paying attention to the words and not the people. My boots crushed last season’s dead oranges like hollow black stones. Cerise carried the white plastic bags swaying beside her like water buckets I’d seen a woman carrying in Vietnam. Suddenly I remembered what Victor had said days after the SAT. “All those words I know and it doesn’t matter now. Insignificant. Inconsequential. Without consequence. Not to do with sequence.”

  My parents’ house was on a small rise, a white wood-frame bungalow with black shutters painted every other year, and a wraparound porch with the railing painted black, too. The yard lights were on, the way my father kept them on until all his work was done, and the whole of Sarrat was lit bright. On the east side of the house were the fruit trees—apricot, fig, nectarine, plum—and on the west side were the two walnut trees.

  But my favorite tree produced nothing but shade. It was at the very edge of the lawn. A huge sycamore with bark like
a white and gray puzzle, with those leaves like dinner plates, and two branches that lay a few feet off the ground. My first time in France, I saw our sycamore—the plane trees shading every village square.

  Past the tree, a small graveled road led to the eight shotgun houses, four on each side, where grove workers had lived back in the early 1900s. When my father had bought the land in 1958, the worker housing was empty. He and Gustave cleaned and painted the houses, and then my father went to get my mother at the boardinghouse, and they returned for Anjolie in Louisiana.

  The porch lights were on at the first house—Cerise’s mother, Miss Felonise. The last time I was here, Bettina was still living in the second house, and her mother, Claudine, next to her. Now those windows were dark.

  Six kids played in the yard at Miss Felonise’s house. They threw a football and ran complicated patterns that took them into the road, twirling and leaping like a strange parade until someone was thrown to the ground.

  My mother’s house was like a Monet, with each season flowering vivid and wild. In February, the wisteria was everywhere, purple and cool. Then pink jasmine over the porch, and pale blue plumbago at the fence, and morning glory all summer. Tonight crimson bougainvillea starred in a huge blaze over the carport. My mother trimmed plants and flowers every night, shaping the vines into tunnels and shade and curtains.

  But in late August, her sunflowers hung dejected. The roses were blackened on the edges of their petals—when I was tiny, trying to water them on a night like this to revive the deep red blossoms, she would say, “Like the devil breathe on them, tite. They fini.”

  She stood in the doorway of our house. She didn’t wave. She never did. She just watched, but I could see her chest rise and fall with a big breath.

  She’d been waiting for my father to finish the watering. Maybe for Victor—if someone had told her he’d been gone two days. When she put her left hand up to the side of her neck, and her forefinger rubbed the skin behind her ear, as she always did when she was waiting for the last person to come home late at night, I knew she was surprised to see me.

  When I went up the porch steps, she was coming outside. “Near bout eleven,” she said. “Sweep out Gustave house before he come back and sleep. They been out to water four nights, oui.”

  “Hot,” I said. “About a hundred, huh?”

  “Hundred and four.”

  She held the broom, the dustpan attached to the top like a flag. My mother, sweeping for so many hours of her life it must accumulate to months. “I’ll come over there with you,” I said, and she froze. Someone laughed in the kitchen, and someone else dropped silverware in the sink.

  I put my bags down on the wooden love seat, but I pulled out my phone, and my mother gave me that look. “I’m waiting to hear from Victor,” I said carefully. “He came to see me earlier.” She raised her eyebrows. My mother had never turned away a child or an adult from her table or her house. Victor had to come back here. My mother could fix up any injury, or she’d make him go to the hospital.

  I went down the steps with her and past the sycamore tree.

  It was like a plantation, I had realized sometime during junior high history, and the irony hadn’t escaped my parents. Their house had only two bedrooms and one bathroom, but was larger, whiter, and still the big house.

  Gustave’s yard wasn’t enclosed by chain-link, like Miss Felonise’s. She had chickens, and small children around, and flowers she didn’t like trampled by dogs. She called to me from her porch, “You finally come home for a minute, oui?”

  “Hey, Miss Felonise,” I said, pausing at her gate. The kids had thrown the football farther down the dark narrow lane.

  “They been waitin on you,” she said, adjusting her scarf over her forehead. She wore a white towel around her neck—damp, I knew. The heat would break soon.

  “I know,” I said. “I was working.”

  She nodded. “Gotta work, bebe. Gotta work.”

  I followed my mother up the cement walk to Gustave’s porch. He had never grown anything in his yard but geraniums and four o’clocks that came up from seed every year around his porch. He used to say, “Out in the cane all day thirty year. Out in the tree all day now. I sit down when I come home.”

  I had come home when I was twenty-two, just before college graduation, when Anjolie died. Complications of diabetes. “Sugar kill her,” Unc Gustave murmured. “That sugar.” Victor was four. And Glorette—mute and dreamlike, her eyes floating over my face but never landing.

  The house was close and hot inside. My mother opened all the windows for the breeze that always came up at night. Each of the houses was shotgun style, with three rooms in a row. Gustave’s front room had always been his bedroom, with his double bed covered by a brown comforter patterned with huge pink hibiscus. His television was on a stand near the window. On the TV tray set up beside it was a coffee cup and an ashtray.

  My mother opened the door to the middle room, and I saw the kitchen beyond. She returned to the small porch and started to sweep the day’s dust and grit from the wooden floor, her back to me. That was how she always began. It was as if she couldn’t look at me coming up the steps or into a room, my face full on to see her own. Even as I walked in, she knew I would leave again soon, and so she was already disappointed.

  The small fireplace had been swept clean for summer. On the brick mantel were three photos. Glorette graduating from eighth grade, with the pointy-collared Qiana shirt I remembered so well—it had different-sized suns against the black silky material. Gustave and Anjolie on their wedding day, my mother and father beside them. The men in dark narrow suits and jaws held stiff, the women in white knee-length dresses, the little white church behind them, sugarcane on the side.

  My mother’s broom scraped against the wooden threshold of the front door. Her back was curved, her neck glossy with sweat under the bun shot through with silver hairs. Her arms were still strong, but the skin underneath swayed gently, soft as curtains.

  In the photo, her face was slightly blurred. She had never been able to stand still. Her hands were frozen, one atop the other, around the bouquet of spider mums. Her knuckles were already swollen and darker than her pale skin, from all the cleaning and washing and cooking she’d already done, and she was twenty years old.

  Anjolie’s face was clear and sharp, serene and distant as if she were modeling for Vogue. Her neck was long and curved, her eyes dark and tilted upwards, and her mouth—Glorette’s lips—full and lush.

  All those days in the armoire.

  My mother moved into the corner behind the TV, and I said, “I’ll do the dishes.” I went past her smell—coffee beans and Jergens lotion—into the next room, but then I had to sit down for a minute. Victor’s bed.

  It used to be Glorette’s.

  It was where we braided our hair, and played with the Barbies that had sat lined up on the shelves her father put above her bed. The sharp feet in their high heels dangled above us, and Glorette tied scarves from Woolworth’s to rings she put in the bottom shelf so they were like curtains. Miss Felonise did all the sewing for everyone, so she made sheer curtains for the two windows on either side of the room.

  Tante Anjolie sat in her chair and watched us. That was her job. She didn’t sew, cook, or garden. She watched us because we were in danger from wasps, snakes, wind gusts, invisible bacteria, and men who might wander into Sarrat.

  I used to see her face suspended there in the glass, her thick black hair like a crown, her huge dark eyes and the way her sand-pale cheeks swelled more each year, and wonder what had happened to her in that armoire. When a car came, she entered the darkness, the wooden door inches from her shoulders, the smell of herself. How long was she closed inside? It was as if her time in the armoire, the blackness and muffled sounds and fear, had made her more afraid than the girls who’d been attacked.

  One night, when I was sleeping with Glorette after a party, I heard muffled crying and talking from the front room, and then Tante Anjolie scream
ed. She said, “Non! Non! Li crazé! Crazé!”

  No. He crushed me. Crushed.

  Unc Gustave came floating through the bedroom and went to the kitchen, his narrow shoulders in the white tank top, his face shining with sweat. Or tears. I heard her sobbing in the front. Glorette’s arm was stiff against mine. Finally she whispered, “If my papa touch her, and she sleep, she start screamin. Nightmares. About somebody lay on her and she can’t breathe.”

  He had never gotten her. Mr. McQuine. But he had. He had gotten inside the armoire and reassembled himself inside her head. Glorette didn’t move. Neither did I. We were both imagining what he looked like. Old and fat and his skin. His hat.

  Then I remembered Glorette—walking behind me in the junior high hallway, and the hand on her elbow when she disappeared into the janitor’s closet. But I didn’t know what to say—then or ever.

  I ran my hands over my forehead, the sweat and gel in my palms. Glorette escaped into music, after Sere Dakar. She listened for hours to Ahmad Jamal, Yusef Lateef, Miles Davis—all the music he had loved. Or some days it was Chaka Khan, Maze, Kool and the Gang—all the music she had loved.

  The wall was covered with postcards and prints I’d sent from my travels, and posters Victor must have bought from One Love. A print I’d sent him from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—a reproduction of Joan of Arc, a painting that looked astonishingly like a photograph, with Joan in a garden, an apparition of herself floating vaguely behind her, leaving the earth. Like Glorette’s two selves, I’d thought. Jacob Lawrence, Dreams No. 2, the woman seated in a purple chair, her dark arms fallen to the side and hands open at the visions in her head. A poster of Common, and an old one of Digital Underground.

  It was a darker, frameless replica of my hallway. Victor wanted to be me.

  The bristles whispered on the other side of the wall.