The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  Minutes after I take Michael’s money, I appear at Ms. Octavia’s side door. As usual, she’s wearing her flowered housedress. The candies I want cost ten cents apiece. I present Ms. Octavia with the money, say I want as many as a ten-dollar bill can buy: that’s one hundred banana Laffy Taffys.

  “Where you den got all this money, girl?”

  “Michael.”

  “Now I don’t know …” Ms. Octavia is kind, but not a fool.

  “He did, Ms. Octavia. Ask him.”

  I know she won’t leave the house to ask. The house is her scene; she departs from it exactly once in the time I know her.

  Ms. Octavia fills a white paper bag with yellow candies and this makes me happy to be alive. I go and sit on her front stoop, facing Wilson. I am busy unwrapping and swallowing and laughing. I am looking down, getting ready to open yet another, when Michael and his afro suddenly appear. He is outside in his white boxer shorts. His mouth is open like a striped bass and so close to my eyes that I can see everything precisely. I’m staring straight at his chipped front tooth. He has my shoulders in his hands and is screaming, “Where my money, lil girl? Where is my mutherfucking money?”

  I grab the white candy bag and fly around Ms. Octavia’s house. We go around in this way a few times until tortoise me tires out. I am wearing my favorite swamp-green long-sleeved jogging suit. I overheat; Michael catches me. The message has not changed: I’d better go get his damn money. I manage to make an exchange with Ms. Octavia and return seven dollars to Michael. Ate two dollars’ worth. Hid one dollar’s worth of Taffys in the backyard, for later on.

  But the moment that solidifies the Rosemary’s Baby title in Lynette’s head is much more serious, as she sees it. One time, playing in the living room around Mom, who sits in the slipper chair, I pull the miniature grandfather clock by its cord from a shelf above and down onto Mom’s head. Blood runs down the side of her face, but she does not raise up. She sits there, stunned, but says, Go get a paper towel. Lynette is hysterical, screaming and turning in circles. Mom needs stitches it’s so bad, and this is the childhood story Lynette tells of me to other people for a long time. “That girl almost killed Mama,” she starts. But Mom always seems forgetful of it when it comes up. As if it never happened. That is her way. Sometimes, because she always carries a lot of things at once—grocery bags, her pocketbook, a grandchild, the mail, someone’s backpack—she slams her finger in the car door and immediately, to squash our fear, says, It’s OK, it’s OK, my babies. Call Troy, go get one of your brothers. Lynette, calm down. It’s OK.

  V

  Four Eyes

  Ever since Alvin’s big brother Herman knocked half of Lynette’s front tooth out, she has stopped smiling so much. Herman had done it in play, with a rock from a slingshot in the yard between the two houses, but the very sight of Herman revives for Lynette the traumatic moment and here he is now knocking at our side door.

  It is Lynette’s thirteenth birthday. I know this because she is leading me in an art project where I am to design several versions of her birthday card out of construction paper. We are in the living room that is meant for pose not play with glitter and glue and scissors, which is how I know with certainty that no adult was around. When Herman stood outside the side door and announced that his and Alvin’s mother, Big Karen, had died of pneumonia we just stood there frozen, not inviting him in or knowing what to say. Lynette was the boss of me then.

  By this point, fourth grade, I have acquired the nickname Tape Recorder for how I listen in on adult conversations and play them back almost verbatim.

  For fifteen years, everyone was saying, no one had stepped foot inside those first two rooms of Ms. Octavia’s shotgun house except for Big Karen, whose rusted car still sat in the drive.

  I seem to remember (though I cannot imagine why I was chosen) walking alongside my sister Karen through Big Karen’s darkened rooms, their walls painted black. It felt like wading; the memory is a strong, wrapping presence, feeling not fact.

  It sounds like myth now, but someone said Carl’s picture was found in a box, pins everywhere on his body. Carl had fought with Herman; this was true. One of them grabbed a crowbar and chased the other. They were back to talking, back to being friends soon after the row, but Big Karen still initiated a court case, leading a judge to decide that Carl could no longer pass in front of Ms. Octavia’s house, where he had passed all of his life, to get to Chef Menteur. He either took the Old Road or crossed over to the other side of the street, where the trailers were, to walk past. Big Karen was into that voodoo, people were saying, and I took this to explain her meanness and every single thing about her.

  After Big Karen’s burial, her two oldest kids, Herman and Rachelle, Alvin’s siblings, try mightily to paint over the walls, but the black paint is unrelenting. They paint three or four or five times and even then the wall stays dingy white, never pearl the way they wanted it. Back then, I took that as a sign. All of us kids did. Now, I think it had more to do with their painting skills.

  One day after Big Karen dies, I find Alvin outside in the backyard, behind the houses. We halfheartedly kick sneakered feet together in a shallow pool of rainwater littered with tarot cards that I assume belonged to Big Karen. I want to use words, but none pass between us. Much of my childhood consisted of wanting to know things and this moment is no different but I don’t know my question. Silence stands between us then and forever on the subject of Alvin’s mom dying when he is eleven.

  Even though it goes against what Pastor Simmons preaches about the body being just a container for what matters, I thought then and still think now: when a person dies in a place they become the place and nothing is ever the same again.

  Big Karen’s death makes her more real. That is how my world works. The ceramic cat named Persia, the dead dogs buried by the bay leaf tree, my father, and now Alvin’s mother.

  When I am ten, my mother discovers that I cannot see beyond a hand in front of my eyes. I have been acting a clown in school to distract from this nonsight. The children sitting all around me are annoying blurs, the chalkboard black waters with scratches of white.

  Sometimes if I slant my head (the way Alvin had instructed for that kiss), close one eye, and peer out of the side of the open eye, I think I can see better. I love desk assignments because I can bend close in to the paper to work silently, but most of our lessons require looking at the teacher and the chalkboard in the front of the classroom, which forces me to act out to hide the truth. This is why I get an X instead of a check for “exercises self-control” on my report card that year. If the teacher asks a question based on something she’s written on the board, I’ll say something smart-alecky to hide the fact that I have no idea what she’s written. It is hard to know what you cannot see. The teacher finally guesses something is wrong—maybe she sees my contorting face—and moves me to the front row where even while squinting my eyes into slits, I still cannot make anything out. I am not legally blind, but nearly. What’s the difference when you can’t see?

  Mom and I drive together in the banana Aries across the High Rise and into “town,” which is what Mom calls anything resembling the New Orleans that most people understand: uptown, downtown, the French Quarter, those places nearer to where she grew up. We park on gravel and walk the short distance to a storefront on Claiborne Avenue. The shop that contains the eyeglasses that would make me see is lit up with cold fluorescent bulbs. All of the buildings where we go for physical wellness have this dull quality. Plastic and metal frames glow from behind like crown jewels. Rows and rows of them. My eyes are examined, and I am directed to choose one of the ugly frames in the much smaller selection offered to children with broken eyes who can’t afford decent-looking glasses.

  “Trees have leaves.”

  According to Mom this is the first thing I say the moment I can see. My chosen glasses are large purple squares, plastic, the outer edges scalloped. The kind older teachers wear and let dangle from a chain around their necks.
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br />   That matters little now. On the way home, riding in the back seat of our yellow Aries I read aloud every single word we pass, from billboards along the interstate and from storefront signs. I read the numbers on the radio dial. The mile markers and exit signs have words, too. We arrive home and I read from the cereal box and from anything that is in front of my working eyes.

  I annoy everyone around me by observing out loud what everyone already knows. Now everything is particular and distinct, the house a nosy child’s dreamworld. I read the label on the bathroom sink and the covers of cassette tapes. There is the Abramson High School sticker in the window of Lynette’s and my room that before was a smear of blue and white on glass pane. My siblings pass before me as if I am a space alien and stare, my eyes small dots behind the lenses. I can see detailed versions of everyone I thought I already knew.

  Karen wears pinkish glasses that nearly match mine except her lenses stick out from the frame, Coke bottles we call them. I laugh out loud when I see the clear version of Karen—who was then twenty-five years old and had just had her first child, Melvin—for what seems like the first time. The protruding thickness of her lenses seemed to taunt: this is what you can aspire to, blind kiddo.

  The walk home from Jefferson Davis changes. I see the scantily clad women walking Chef Menteur Highway as Alvin and I wait for the light to change. How Alvin walks now with the older boys and the switching girls, leaving me behind. Now, waiting at the light to cross over to the short end of Wilson after the school day, I can see Carl in the distance, milling about outside our house. Can see him looking in my direction and waving a hand.

  Every night, I hide the purple glasses underneath my pillow while I sleep. During the night, they change position so that when I wake, I beat the mattress frantically in search of them.

  Only when they are on my face can I know what kind of day I have awakened to.

  By the end of my tenth year, my first year of twenty-twenty eyesight, one detail overwhelms them all. Our side of Wilson Avenue, the short end, seems a no-matter place where police cars routinely park, women’s heads bobbing up and down in the driver’s seat. I am struck with the wonder of this, how we live in a city where police take such peculiar coffee breaks. Walking home from school, I try not to see what is right in front of my face. Sometimes, when I want the world to go blurry again, I remove my glasses when passing by these scenes. In this way, I learn to see and to go blind at will.

  VI

  Elsewheres

  We take photos because we do not want to remember wrong.

  There are, in the handful of images of me from the start of my teenage years, glimpses of the child I once was. When I still smiled with abandon, goofy-like, forehead veins straining, and gave a laugh where my nose got involved. Standing on the perch, where we posed for picture-taking time, a white silk bow upright against the backdrop of my hair, I am holding a bright-red Edward Livingston Middle School Windbreaker with an eagle soaring across the right breast. In 1991, in sixth grade, I was an academic star, which had earned me the Windbreaker and the right to call myself a scholar.

  In another photo I abandon the jacket to show off a royal-blue “honors” sash that showed how narrow I’d become. Mom stood beside me, matching: Her pale-pink suit against my pale-pink dress with its puffed shoulders and peplum hitting midthigh, far below my nonexistent waist. Mom’s white stockings match my white stockings, a two-for-one sale at K&B drugstore. She is high cheekboned, smiling to show all her front and some of her side teeth, eyes closed, holding on to my Student of the Month certificate.

  Lynette appears with me in one picture, holding her own plaque in one hand, a basketball trophy in the other. She is academic, athletic, and beautiful with a narrow toffee-colored face. She, too, wears a pink suit, but hers is bright coral. Mom stands between us, one hand on each of our backs, as if presenting us to the world. Her upper body leans toward Lynette, who is already six feet tall; her knees angle toward me. All of our clothing has been conceived of by Ivory Mae and sewn by her own hand. “Ivory’s Creations” read the tags in back of all our outfits.

  At twelve, I am the same height as my mother, but this will not last. Soon I will grow taller and she will never catch up with me. This will matter in some ways, when it comes to her disciplining me, but mostly it will not.

  No photographs exist to document the rest of my time at Edward Livingston Middle School—grades seven through nine—because I won’t accumulate any more academic achievements to brag about via snapshots on the living room perch. But Karen will take her place there, wearing a cap and gown with a pregnant belly pushing out from underneath. She will graduate from Southern University of New Orleans, then give birth to Brittany, her second and final child. All of us—Karen, her two children, Lynette, Mom, and me—stay living in the Yellow House together.

  Nineteen ninety-one to 1996 is the half decade when my life is most defined by the comings and goings of my family around me. These are the years when I do not feel ownership of my body or do not yet know how to take ownership of it, when my limbs suddenly shoot out. During this awkward phase, I begin to cultivate an obsession with the house’s windows and doors, the ins and outs of the place.

  I am thirteen when Lynette is eighteen. I enter teenagehood when Lynette is leaving it. In her high school photographs, she poses in front of painted backgrounds wearing jerseys, holding a basketball or a volleyball. Or she is pictured at school dances in ruffled, strapless gowns—turquoise or glimmering white or royal blue—Ivory’s creations labored over after her job at the nursing home, into the night, and through the morning and afternoon until the precise second Lynette steps into them. Lynette worships Molly Ringwald, has done so since the late eighties, and feels that the film Pretty in Pink tells the story of her life. Her dresses, then, are part of her own movie’s costume design.

  In 1992, Lynette still lives at home in the Yellow House, but in a year she will be gone. Her departure builds as do the number of sketched women dancing across our now lavender bedroom. Lynette reads fashion magazines, mostly Vogue, voraciously, tears out those designed women, and hangs them on the wall alongside her own fashionable cutouts. She’s fixing herself, too, bothering Mom about getting her chipped front tooth repaired. Mom finds a dentist on Chef Menteur who promises gleaming white, but in the end Lynette’s implant, which costs in the thousands, grays. Instead of drawing so much, she fills out college applications for New York City schools, asking Mom for money to Express Mail packets she’s procrastinated about.

  While Lynette maps her escape from the Yellow House, I begin seventh grade at Livingston, which feels like another country. New behaviors are required. I enter a crew of girl-women who go by such names as Chocolate T and Red. Sometimes, they call me Slim.

  Livingston faces Dwyer Road at the tail end of the long side of Wilson. A tan-bricked building, its cheerless facade reads more detention center, less school. Inside, we school ourselves and each other—that is the unofficial curriculum—calling each other names as a way of elevating ourselves among our peers. The goal of every school day is to avoid getting ribbed, which means you spend a lot of time scheming about how to rib another person best and first. You have to be prepared with a verbal comeback that will make the other kids laugh—not at, but away from you. You don’t want to tease yourself into a physical fight, just verbal spar hard and loud enough so that the teacher breaks it up. Name-calling starts with phrases like “yo mama” and “yo breath” and “that’s why …” The things that get you targeted have to do with the unavoidable conditions of our lives—how clean your navy-blue-and-white uniform looks, how you smell, who your parents are.

  Occasionally, somebody would “iff” at you—make a fast motion pretending to hit you but stopping short—to test your fear and reflexes. We call it iffing because it is a game of what-if. The lesson: always be ready for whatever.

  I don’t remember what unenlightened things I said back then, but I perform these verbal jabs most consistently during
Ms. Green’s English class. She is a tall, unshapely woman we call Ironing Board. Her feet stretch out the square-toe penny loafers I fixate on as she patrols the class with her eyes from where she sits behind a large pecan-colored desk. Her hair is a frizzy red mass of fallen leaves. She speaks in a raspy male voice and carries with her a scent of cigarette smoke and peppermint mouth.

  Often because of things I’ve said, name-calling, she raps my hand with several rulers bound with gray electrical tape. She grabs the tips of my fingers, pulls them back so that the flat of my palm stretches to trembling. The sting radiates out through my fingertips. If I jump too much the thumb moves involuntarily and that is a pain I would think about the entire day and the night, too. Ms. Green’s ruler sometimes lands on the cartilage where my thumb bends, and this leads me to rage I feel cannot be helped. What was at first a simple chastening in front of my class would then become a fight, teacher against out-of-control child yelling profanities and whatever else would help me avoid shedding tears in front of my peers, which was the last thing on earth I want anyone to say about me: that I break, that I broke, that a teacher broke me. When she hits my thumb, and I’ve gone wild-child on her to suffocate the pain, Ms. Green sends me outside to wait in the hallway. Out there, she reasons, I can make all of the commotion I want.

  But without my audience, I stand staring at lockers. From time to time, my nephew James and I meet in the hallways. Either he has already been put out of another classroom for bad behavior, or if we are in the same class, he misbehaves in solidarity with me. I am his Auntie Mo after all. In the hallway where no one is passing, we make each other laugh or we just sit sullen, the floor tiles cold beneath our bare legs, feeling like nothings and no ones while English class goes on inside the closed door at our backs.