Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  I couldn’t stop my brain from writing. If a stranger came here—remarkably unassimilated, folk culture, an enclave—it would be fascinating to New York or LA for the Sunday paper. Recipes could be included—this gumbo which would never taste the same as my mother’s, the oddity of how she made her coffee, which would take way too much time to compete with Starbucks.

  Who would come here?

  The shrimp were pink and tender. The andouille were firm coins of pork and blaze. Clarette and Cerise and Miss Felonise and my mother would have peeled all the shrimp and sliced all the peppers.

  Cerise snapped her fingers in front of my face. “So now you gon sleep?”

  “Just thinking I haven’t had anything this good to eat in a long time,” I said, knowing that wasn’t enough.

  “Your maman make gumbo every weekend,” Cerise said.

  Clarette said, “Give Fantine a break. She got a hella commute.” She grinned at me and raised her eyebrows, those perfectly waxed commas. Her braids were fresh, and she wore earrings that dangled nearly to her collarbone. Clarette worked all day at the youth prison, with no jewelry, loose hair, or loveliness allowed. “She got a breakfast meeting in the morning, right?”

  “I’ma skip it,” I said.

  Clarette said, “I’ll put Danae on the couch, then.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll sleep on the couch. That way I can watch for Victor.”

  Clarette said, “Why he gotta hang out with them? Alfonso so stupid he woulda got killed inside if I didn’t watch his sorry ass.” There was only inside and outside. Alfonso wasn’t going back. He’d done three years. “Got two kinds of fool in him,” she added. “My brother and Bettina.”

  “Them two need to get fixed.” Cerise rolled her eyes. “Bettina talkin bout she missin babies. Shit.”

  “She got two grown and two half-grown,” Clarette said. “Alphonse sittin up there on the Westside with nothin but a big-screen. Sleep on the floor half the time. Pitiful.”

  Then we all stopped. I knew we were thinking of Glorette’s empty apartments.

  I went to the sink for a glass of water. There were two windows over my mother’s sink, and she could see out to Miss Felonise’s house, and the road. On the wall beside, I had hung two framed postcards for her. Scenes of snow, frigid in gray and brown and white. A detail of Sisley’s La Neige à Marly-le-Roi, with the bare trees and snowy field. A detail from Monet’s The Magpie, just the dark wooden gate, the black-headed bird, and the vivid shadows on the snow.

  “Make me feel cool, even the summer,” she told me, just one time. She had never touched snow. We could see it, from here, on the San Bernardino Mountains, but she had never wanted to drive there.

  I started drying the stack of blue willow dishes—a set of ten, Staffordshire china that I’d bought for my mother years ago in England. The pattern was willow trees and peacocks and a curving bridge over a stream.

  “Uh-uh,” Clarette said, when I opened the cupboard above the stove. “She keepin em over there now.”

  “Where?” I said, holding the heavy stack, and Cerise put down her glass with an impatient precise click that said, You ain’t never here. You don’t wash dishes now. You less of a daughter than we are.

  She held open the pantry door. On the wide middle shelf where the flour and sugar and rice used to be were bowls and small plates. I stacked the dinner plates there.

  “Danae can reach them to set the table when she’s here,” Cerise said.

  “Your maman shoulder got hurt last month, when she was cuttin that bougainvillea. She want the dishes lower now so she ain’t gotta reach up high,” Clarette said.

  Cerise said, “I heard Bettina let some woman stay with her. And she crept on over to Reynaldo in the middle of the night. Trying to get with him.” She looked at me and said, “So you still ain’t found nobody good up there in LA, huh?” When I gave her our old look, the one that said, Are you kidding me? she said, “I don’t know how you gon go without a man like that.”

  Clarette said, “Hell, you get so tired you just don’t care.”

  “Not me,” Cerise huffed.

  “Come work a shift with me at Chino and you won’t want to see nothing with that third leg the rest of the week.”

  “Like I don’t work eight hours?”

  “I ain’t said that, Cerise.”

  “Well, Reynaldo ain’t gon do without. Bettina’s messed up.” Cerise picked at her fingernails. Red polish chipped off like flakes of chili pepper.

  I said, “Remember Tony? He said he had ten years of amazing sex, which was way more than most people get, so he was okay going without now.”

  “Your gay friend?” Cerise said.

  “He’s fine,” Clarette said.

  “Maybe it’s different for a man,” Cerise said.

  “It’s different for him,” I said. “Because of how he looks at the world.”

  “Like you?” she said, raising her eyebrows high.

  Then a voice called through the front screen door, “Hey, y’all.” Bettina came in and let the door slam softly, but she hesitated. “You put that gumbo away?”

  “Oh, hell no,” Cerise said, lifting her hands. “Hell damn no.”

  “Cerise,” Bettina said, in the doorway. “That ain’t me, okay? That’s they bidness.”

  “Who the hell is she? She down there right now?”

  Bettina shook her head so hard the thin loose hairs around her forehead swayed like antennae. Cerise got up and stood beside the open window, lighting a cigarette, keeping her face to the screened dark.

  It was still my mother’s house. “Come on,” I said, and pulled out the chair beside me. I got Bettina a bowl of rice, ladled the gumbo over it, and poured a Coke for her.

  We hadn’t all of us sat at this table for years. When we were small, we sat here every day after school, shelling pecans in fall, making pralines to sell, helping snap beans in summer, and doing our homework.

  Glorette always sat in the chair at the end. The one empty now.

  Bettina’s back was bent over her plate. Her fat had collected below her shoulders, pushing out like a shelf under her bra. Her upper arms were round and pink-red as hams. Hams I’d seen hanging in a farmhouse in Italy. But all her weight was above the waist—her legs and hips were still thin, and in her knit shorts and tank top she looked like a prizefighter.

  “She ain’t been back.” Bettina glanced at Cerise’s elbow. Her hair was held with a white scrunchie like a tiny Elizabethan collar, the fringe sticking out with static from the wind. “Hey, I got to get my party on now and then, and this brotha from San Bernardino been comin by. He cut a hole in the fence down by the box houses. His sister came one time, and she got drunk.”

  I thought Cerise would put out the cigarette on her fat shoulder. “Dahani sell CDs, burn you anything for twelve dollars. Custom order. That’s how I met him—at the swap meet. You could get oldies, whatever. Remember Glorette’s favorite song?”

  We all froze. Bettina trying to pull that? I said, “You sure you know it?”

  “ ‘Golden Time of Day,’ ” she said, sucking her teeth at me. “Maze. Yeah, and Chaka. ‘Move Me No Mountain.’ I ain’t never really figured out them jazz songs she liked—the ones with no words—but I been had Dahani make me one with them old jams. Cause I was thinkin about her. For tomorrow. I was gon give it to Victor, you know.”

  “Victor?” Clarette said.

  Then suddenly Bettina said, “Victor need to stop ridin with Fonso and Jazen. He been to college. He need to get married and have some babies.”

  “What?”

  “Fonso already got two. Twins run in our family, no shit. But Victor—” Then she looked at me. “Just like you. College, yeah, all that. But that ain’t it. He the only Picard. Gustave people come up hard in Louisiana. My maman use to tell me.”

  Her maman was Claudine. The first one Mr. McQuine took away. The one who’d had a son.

  Bettina said, “Victor the only Picard left—he
need to keep that blood in the world.”

  Before I could say anything else, Clarette said, “You know I can’t listen to this. I saved Alfonso’s narrow ass three times inside, Bettina. He’s so stupid, with that grin like he can do whatever he wants.”

  Bettina’s voice rose higher. “I cain’t do nothin with him. You know he hardheaded.”

  “No,” Cerise said now, moving fast, putting out her cigarette under faucet water. “I’m so tired of hearin that. That’s it? He hardheaded and we’re done?”

  “Cerise,” Bettina said, folding her own arms so her shoulders rose massive and glistening with sweat. “Lafie and Rey Jr. still little boys. You don’t know yet.”

  Bettina’s eyes were green as wine-bottle glass. When we were younger, she was all rosy and emerald and laughing, never working hard in the groves because she saw her mother get money from men and didn’t see any need to be different.

  Clarette said, “Better hope they’re not sellin rock out that damn dryer tonight.”

  “Victor and Fonso ain’t doin none a that,” Bettina said.

  “They’re in the car,” Clarette said resolutely, her whole face changed to prison guard. “Whatever he does, if Jazen sells drugs or robs somebody, and they’re in the car, that’s conspiracy. And Victor? Cops can call him a known associate now.” She went into my bedroom, to check on her daughter, and Cerise followed her down the hallway.

  I put Bettina’s plate in the sink. One grain of rice lay snug against the rim, like the egg case of an ant. I turned my back to the counter and felt the edge dig into my spine.

  And when Bettina looked at me—her brows plucked thin as a trail of ants along her forehead—she said, “Well, I ain’t even known Victor was in the car till just before I walked up here.” She chewed the last of the crushed ice from her glass. “I went outside and he was dead sleep in the backseat.”

  “What?” I caught my breath, smoke and rum and roux all heavy in my chest.

  “Alfonso down there, actin all shady. I don’t know what he up to, but he axed me for money, and he taken some clothes,” Bettina said, getting up. “I was watchin TV, and I ain’t seen Victor.”

  “They came in the back way?” I said. I bent to put my boots back on. “Alfonso and Jazen have a gun.” Dead. Sleep. Which one? Even Jazen couldn’t be that heartless.

  “Fonso said Victor drank some Bacardi. He said Victor’s a lightweight. Fell out soon as he drank it.”

  I told Bettina we’d take my car. Victor might not be able to walk. And I didn’t want to tell my father—Jazen had a gun, and my father’s rifle was in the truck.

  After we went through the gate and turned on La Reina, I went down the dirt road between our grove and Mr. Sotelo’s. His grove wasn’t fenced, and my father always mentioned how much fruit was stolen by people who drove down this road and went right in, unless Sotelo and his son patrolled every night.

  The chain-link was cut along one pole and peeled back neatly, wired to the next pole.

  Bettina started whining. Pitiful. “Uncle Enrique gon be mad. I told Dahani he needed to fix that up and just come on the other way by the barn, but he don’t like everybody in his bidness.” She was sweating, and now her straightened hair stuck out from her forehead in spikes like a black Statue of Liberty.

  The branches hadn’t been trimmed, but broken off by his car, so he must have a vehicle he didn’t care about. We bounced over the ruts from last year’s rain, and turned in to the dirt clearing.

  Three small stone houses, built by three Italian men from the Piedmont who had lived here back in 1910, every day nailing pine slats together to make the famous orange crates with labels that people collected now for museums and living rooms. The houses stayed empty all of my childhood. Marcus and I had lain in the middle one, on a blanket scented with eucalyptus oil.

  No cars parked here. The road that led up to the barn was smooth and packed from my brothers’ two trucks. In the third house, one of the front windows was broken, patched with lines of duct tape that gleamed in the moonlight like a blinding strike of lightning.

  They were gone. I shouted at Bettina, “Why didn’t you come up and get us right away?”

  “I didn’t even know you was here, Fantine, okay?” We got out of the car, and she looked daggers at me. “I had company. And they was foolin around with some clippers.” Her eyes went to the dark spot on the side of her house. A cement apron, where the box makers had worked, faced south. Food wrappers like dirty snowballs, and piles of black shivering gently in the night breeze.

  I went closer. Hair. Clouds of darkness moving toward the edge of the cement. That must have been Jazen’s cornrows—unraveled and most of the excess hair cut off.

  And on the ground, near the marks of the tires, Victor’s dreadlocks—still twisted and curled, like burned twigs scattered in the dust.

  “Fonso cut hair in prison, didn’t he? They’re fucking up Victor’s life!”

  She shouted back, “How you know he ain’t wanted to ride with them? How you know he ain’t havin a ball?”

  I turned toward the broken window, the Miller High Life cans thrown in a pile along the porch with ants streaming into the keyholes, the trash bags ripped open by raccoons or coyotes and bones strewn in the dirt.

  My father hated ants, battled them constantly. Them fromille, he always said. “He’s gonna kick you out.”

  Bettina stood on her porch, her pink shoulders heaving. “You ain’t got no bidness here—you don’t even live here,” she hissed.

  “Shut up, Bettina,” I whispered. “You’re every fucked-up cliché in the world.”

  “So are you!” she said loudly. “Them little hoops cause you cain’t be wearin no doorknockers. Hair all plastered down in a bun like a fake librarian. Wear the same damn clothes every time I see you.”

  “Fine. I’m a cliché, too,” I shouted. “Only one not a cliché was Glorette! She didn’t care what anyone thought. And you’re disrespecting her by letting Fonso take Victor down.” I was shaking, sweating again. “Victor’s not a cliché—the only one left.”

  Her arms were folded on top of her chest, like an old lady. Her face was dripping and impassive under the loose hair that had begun to wilt.

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Fonso say he ain’t goin back to jail again. I heard him say my brother’s name. Maybe they gone to my brother’s house.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Albert.”

  That was Mr. McQuine’s son. That must be who Alfonso had stayed with five years ago, when he went to Louisiana.

  “Where does he live?”

  Her shoulders rose a few inches. “Sometime he stay in Vegas. Sometime he stay in Louisiana. I ain’t seen him in years.” She went inside and closed the battered door.

  I turned my car around, slow and careful, but the wheels raised dust that I knew would settle on Victor’s lost hair.

  “Matin.” My father washed his hands at the kitchen sink, staring into the dark. Morning. He wanted to think until morning. One a.m.—nighttime was Jazen’s.

  “Did you tell Maman?”

  He shook his head. He said, “Matin,” and went down the hallway.

  Cerise and Clarette had gone home. The small hexagonal tiles on the bathroom floor were always the coolest part of the house. I locked the door and lay there on the tile, remembering.

  The fever had started on the last day of the bus ride, and when I’d walked home, carrying that suitcase, it felt as if icy October had gone down my throat, as if the crystals floating in the air had coated my skin and then my body tried to melt them.

  I sat there and looked at the river, in the warm California sunshine, remembering the paint on the car hood, until my father found me. In the cab of the Apache, my whole body shook and trembled with chills, and my teeth hurt from chattering.

  “That cold get inside her,” he told my mother when he led me inside, and I remembered thinking, How did he imagine the exact way I felt?

  In my o
ld bed, the four windows of the breakfast nook letting in fractured light from the jasmine vines and the sycamore tree, the chills came harder—like sparkles traveling from my bones and belly to dance across my veins.

  I lay in the dark now, remembering exactly how much it hurt. Waves of pain between my hip bones.

  My mother brought two blankets. She brought hot rum mixed with water and molasses, and made me take two burning sips. Then she sat silently beside me. I was going to be eighteen years old soon. I was not a child.

  After a while, my chest felt full of blood, swollen, and I got out of bed to throw up. My mother heard me run to the bathroom. She stood outside this door.

  Fantine?

  But I had already been FX for two months.

  Fantine, bebe, you need help?

  Blood seeped down my legs. When I got up, the white tile was pooled with blood. I sat on the toilet and looked down. A dark shining thing fell from me. Not big. Three lobes of an orange. But heavy, like jelly, like nothing I’d ever seen, and before I could look away, it trembled briefly at the surface and then sank.

  I smelled the faint remnants of Marcus’s cologne on my temples when I dried my face. From his hug.

  It had not been a baby. But it would have been Marcus’s baby. The Scion had unhinged it from my body. Untethered it. Unmoored it.

  I went quietly into my old bedroom.

  It had been the breakfast nook, off the kitchen, until I turned ten. Danae slept in the daybed I’d gotten in high school. She was eight. Flung out on the bed in the heat, the black metal fan on the little table beside her lifting the baby hairs at her forehead. I sat on the wooden chair at my old desk. The glass of cool water was on the little table, and crushed peppermints filled the green bowl as they had when I was small.

  My mother crushed them so we wouldn’t choke on the whole candy when we lay there with the coldness in our mouths, the fan blowing in night air from the screen. And on my desk, the green pottery vase filled with sunflowers.

  “Why do you have flowers in every room every day?” I asked when I was little, and she was putting roses in the living room.