The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  I wrote anguished letters to Tiffany that were never sent: “I have felt really weird ever since you said that crap about me not being open. I was appalled by what you said. I don’t feel comfortable being in a relationship with you anymore since you spend most of the time ‘observing.’ I will hopefully find new friends in my new life when I go to college. See you later. Bye!”

  Mom was never satisfied with the state of the house. Not even in the days when Simon Broom was alive and insisted they join the Pontchartrain Park Social Aid and Pleasure Club, which required they hold at least one meeting at the house on Wilson. I had to work hard to fix it up. I didn’t have the nice stuff. Furniture was nice, but compared to what other people had…. We still had heaters when everybody else had central. It all looked real nice though. Everybody always had a good time, but I felt like I deserved something better. I tried to raise y’all, I don’t care what it is, if it’s yours, be proud. Whatever you have, make sure it look nice.

  There was the house we lived in and the house we thought we should live in. There was the house we thought we should live in and the house other people thought we lived in. These houses were colliding. And the actual house?

  My memories of the house’s disintegration have collided, the strains impossible to separate, its disintegration a straight line always lengthening, ad infinitum.

  Simon Broom never finished the upstairs that was the boys’ room, so there was wall framing instead of wall to look into. The ceiling showed unfinished beams. “Those were my monkey bars,” says Byron.

  Your daddy didn’t want to spend the money to do things right. Instead of taking up the kitchen floor if it had a hole in it, like anybody with sense, he’d just take boards and put over the hole so one part be up all crazy-like and you’d be walking up and down across the floor.

  That’s how things were fixed when Dad was alive. Once he died, things continued on in that way or not at all. Traces of my dead father were everywhere in the house—a door sanded but unpainted; holes cut for windows, the panes uninstalled—like songs cut off right at the groove.

  Over time, the house’s electrical problems worsened; the lights in the add-on would short out while the original house stayed lit, the house a malfunctioning Christmas tree.

  “Daddy was always doing something to fix up the house. That was an ongoing thing,” Michael says. “Daddy would always go get something from somewhere else, something already been used, maybe if a lot of the stuff he built the house with wasn’t used it might have stayed up. That’s one way to think about it.”

  “A house has to be maintained,” says my brother Simon now, after the fact, but back then when he was in the army, the house felt like falling apart and the older children didn’t fix it back up. Eddie had left for marriage. Carl was married, too. Darryl found crack and its accompanying trouble. Byron had enlisted in the Marines. Other brothers were running after women or seeking work in order to get women. And then there were just us three daughters in the house: myself, Karen, and Lynette.

  Mom was always trying to repair things in the way she knew. The light switch in the kitchen broke, the wires exposed. Mom put masking tape on the wall, made a perfect square around the switch, which—for a time—held the wires in place.

  Sometime in the nineties, though I cannot remember or find evidence of exactly when, Mom refinanced the house and installed yellow siding. What’s strange is how I don’t remember what color the house was before—I have only ever called it the Yellow House. The siding, pale yellow, was delicate in appearance, but striking enough that it still made a show, made the house appear new for a time. Subtle and classic, our yellow. Also highly susceptible to dirt.

  The contractors, taking advantage of a woman alone, didn’t install it properly, either. They left the decaying wood underneath, installed the pristine vinyl siding on top of rot, which we would not know until more than a decade later when Hurricane Katrina showed the underside of everything.

  Shortly after the siding, Karen’s amateur-carpenter boyfriend installed a geometric-patterned linoleum on the kitchen floor, but the corners started curling a few years too soon. One minute you’d be walking around barefoot and gliding on the linoleum Mom had polished, then two steps later you’d suddenly feel yourself walking on wood patches where the linoleum had come up. The floor became pocked with holes. Around this time, the rats came to live with us, making so much noise in the kitchen while I was trying to read James Baldwin or sleep that I didn’t dare get up out of bed to see what they were doing. I’d know in the morning, anyway.

  Karen’s boyfriend also built a kitchen cabinet, but never got around to making its doors. Mom did the best she could: white linen on the bottoms; fruit-themed valances on top. The house wore curtains instead of doors.

  The plumbing was never right. We had buckets underneath the kitchen sink catching dishwater. The kitchen cabinets had big holes that led to the outside. Mom plugged those holes with foil after hearing somewhere that rats couldn’t chew through. And still they did.

  The room that imposed the greatest discomfort was the newer bathroom with the only lock in the house. Drafts came through the window that looked out to the back alley. Overridden by vines where lizards and snakes lived, it was plain wild. I imagined this greenery, twisted and gnarled, overtaking the house from the backside, enveloping us in a green canopy that would grow up over the roof and down to the other side. We would wake one morning wrapped in its cocoon, unable to bust out. A nonview can be a most torturous thing when the mind wants to wander and skip along a landscape. That bathroom and its broken faucets: we needed pliers to turn on the water. The more you used the pliers the sooner the grip wore off and so then you could not turn the water on at all. Is this why we resorted to boiling water on the stove and carrying it through the lavender room where I slept, saying, “Watch it, watch it, watch it now”? Or was it that the hot water heater had given up, the pilot light gone out? What is important is our carrying boiled water through the house and to the bath in our red beans and rice pot, the pouring of the scalding hot water into the bathtub or sink. All of us still loving baths, the boys and the girls, baths being an everyday event for us, trying to relax in a room whose surroundings you did not trust and therefore despised. When would the rats come out from underneath the sink where the plastic bowl caught leaking water?

  You could not say.

  This is how your disappointment in a space builds, becomes personal: You, kitchen, do not warm me. You, living room, do not comfort me. You, bedroom, do not keep me.

  Michael had married and bought a three-bedroom house on Red Maple Street in a brand-new middle-class subdivision in Michoud. His house had plush wall-to-wall carpeting and a dramatic arched entryway. He and his wife drove a brand-new red Dodge Dynasty, which stood for something. Michael was a perfectionist, creative, obsessed with the presentation of food. Of all the boys, he was most like Mom. He took Mom’s most basic dishes and turned them into menu-worthy appetizers—for instance, putting Mom’s bell pepper stuffing inside an egg roll with a sweet potato sauce on the side. He was always coming around to see how his girls—which is what he called me and Mom and Lynette and Karen—were doing.

  Michael initiated several Yellow House home-repair projects. He went out and bought two-by-fours and was tearing down the rotted den walls, but eventually the project fizzled—whoever was supposed to help never showed up—and stayed stuck as if incomplete were the happiest of locales. Nobody really wanted to fix the house. They was thinking about they own dream house. It was easier for Michael to buy things that did not require rebuilding: a hot water heater and a new stove.

  Some nights we’d return home from church to find termites or flying cockroaches gathered in our rooms and I’d stay up nearly all the night watching them fly, crawl, and fly.

  To describe the house fully in its coming apart feels maddening, like trying to pinpoint the one thing that ruins a person’s personality.

  It seems to me now that as the house beca
me more and more unwieldy, my mother became more emphatic about cleaning. Mom’s cleanings were exorcisms. At the core of her scrubbings was her belief in meritocratic tropes. That hard work paid off, for instance. How could I still believe this was true after witnessing her down underneath the kitchen table cleaning—her frame reduced to a small bundle? Oh, to scrub raw a floor that will not come clean! There was always a bucket of mop water sitting around. She was always spraying the tub, wiping the counters down, scrubbing the burners. This was especially true at Christmas.

  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, she’d go through the house singing, pulling down boxes weighted with ornaments, some of them glass and wrapped in paper from Christmases ago, some of them gifts from our grandmother, bought from places long disappeared. Gold was Mom’s color, not silver, which made us laugh at her story of the year Dad bought a fake silver Christmas tree, which he sat in front of the den’s row of windows at the back of the house. It was the scariest little tree.

  Mom labored over the living room at Christmas as an artist would. No detail was lost on her: gold garland around the door trim; shiny red paper on the front door, which served the dual purpose of keeping the draft out and hiding its ugly tan color; a gorgeous bow in the center made the door a gift.

  The room drew us in—beckoning to us from wherever we were in the house—suddenly you’d find yourself inside it just staring at the things Ivory Mae had made. At night, we lit the Christmas tree and sat on the carpet watching its blinking lights, not wanting ever to leave the warm, full room. For once, nothing was missed or desired.

  How about the Christmas tunes, Mom would say, and someone would go get Lynette’s old pink stereo. Mom sang “Silent Night” along with the Temptations in a voice straining for the operatic, soaring, trembling, cracking sometimes. When she sang, she always started off strong and then quickly faded as if disapproving of her own sound. When “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” came on, things picked up: she touched her nose and stood to shimmy her hips. She balled her hands up and shook them, made her mouth tight, jigged and rocked. From the floor, we tapped our hands together and shimmied from the waist up.

  One year, for a final touch, she threw snow from a plastic bag onto the tree. Another year, she sprayed snow from a can. But this happened only once or twice. The snow was too much of a delusion, and she hated the way it spread everywhere on the carpet.

  In 1994, my sophomore year, the billboards sprouted, rising up over the great oaks and above the highways, Gothic text on plain white: THOU SHALT NOT KILL.

  No one heeded the boards.

  We watched the crime stories on the nightly news: police tape wrapped around trees everywhere in the city, like strings of unsolved crimes. That year, when I was fourteen, fear came to live, twisted in our hearts, and hid underneath my bed.

  This was the year when we disregarded stop signs after dark and treated red lights as stop signs, when we did not pull over if the blue lights of the law flashed behind us, when we could not trust anyone or anything. New Orleans cops were renegades, carjacking and brutally assaulting drivers pulled over on routine traffic stops. One cop raped a Tulane student in his police car. In 1994, policeman Len Davis, also known as Robocop and the Desire Terrorist, who in his off time guarded a cocaine warehouse, ordered the murder of a woman who confidentially (she thought) reported his pistol-whipping of a seventeen-year-old to the police department. The informant was thirty-two years old, a mother of three. Her name was Kim Groves and she was dead. One of 424 murders that year.

  Those are just the highlights.

  Tourism rose.

  Lynette returned, dejected, to the Yellow House after a year in New York City. She reclaimed our room, but not her position in it, so busy was she with finding work. She couldn’t afford tuition and life in Manhattan. No one had told her what a life there would cost, because no one in our family knew.

  She sought work in the French Quarter. There was no work in New Orleans East now. The Plaza mall where she had worked during high school was on its way to dead, having once been a vast labyrinth (eighty acres, one hundred plus stores). When it opened in 1973, a mariachi band played in front of Fiesta Plaza Ice Rink. “Whoever heard of selling ice skates to New Orleanians,” a Maison Blanche department store ad read. “Does sound a bit like selling water skis to Eskimos, doesn’t it?” But the skating rink was all the rage. And the movie theater. But now there were Night Out Against Crime meetings in the mall’s parking lot. Going there put you at risk of being held up (before you could step foot out of the car) by a person with a gun. The big department stores that once drew people to travel across the interstate bridge from all directions—Maison Blanche and Sears and Mervyn’s and DH Holmes—had mostly pulled out, leaving only Dillard’s. The customers, now mostly high school and middle school students, stole their wares.

  A local business advocacy group called New Orleans East Economic Development Foundation was formed, and they waged campaigns to save the Plaza and the East as if for the soul of man, launching a public relations campaign, “New Orleans East—It’s Great Living,” with ads on the radio and on the sides of public buses that would take Lynette to the French Quarter. They were fighting the East’s increasing disenfranchisement, its abandonment. “Pull out your map of the City of New Orleans and if you haven’t noticed already, a good portion of New Orleans East is not there at all,” they said in a meeting, presenting a revised map of New Orleans that included the East.

  Jazzland, a theme park now famous for the haunted look of its abandoned, rusting rides, was in the planning stages then. It was, in 1994, six years before opening, New Orleans East’s great hope. Prostitution on Chef Menteur Highway seemed the only industry still booming, no downturn in sight.

  Lynette found work in the French Quarter at clothing boutiques and restaurants. It was normal in New Orleans to work two or three jobs at once to reach a decent salary—even for police officers who earned a mere $18,000 a year and were responsible for buying their uniforms and their handguns.

  In 1994, Grandmother’s mind was deteriorating at the pace of the law. It began this way: Grandmother was hiding money from herself, in old pocketbooks. That did not seem unusual for a woman in her midseventies, but then she was washing dishes in cold water and then she was cooking the dirty dishrag in a pot of red beans. On weekends, rather than our traveling to St. Rose for family gatherings, as we had been doing all of my life, Auntie dropped Grandmother off to live in the Yellow House with us.

  My job was to keep Grandmother inside and to keep our brother Darryl out. Grandmother couldn’t be trusted to know where she belonged. Darryl would scheme and steal for crack.

  Grandmother would get it in her mind that there was someplace she had to be, people were waiting for her, didn’t we understand, we who—suddenly—were not her people at all, judging by the confusion on her face.

  Trying to keep Grandmother indoors was hard. While she was trying to pry open the side door with me standing in front of it, she spoke of women who were waiting to meet her, women who, my mother said, were from the world before me. Aunt Shugah was waiting, Grandmother was always imploring, and she didn’t like to wait. Or Sarah McCutcheon. Sometimes, it was her birth mother, Rosanna Perry. Grandmother was a skinny woman with the strength of a weight lifter. I’d sometimes have to peel her fingers from around the door, one at a time, her nail beds cherry from holding on so tight. When it became this serious, I’d yell for someone else in the house to come. “Help!”

  And still, Grandmother escaped one Mardi Gras morning. Troy was supposed to be keeping an eye out. Grandmother was missing for hours. Police finally found her marching behind a horse, in a parade, uptown. Clutching a moneyless purse, she’d left the Yellow House, evaded the prying eyes of Ms. Octavia next door, somehow made it across Chef Menteur and on to the number 90 bus to celebrate Carnival time.

  The short end of the street ate whole members of its own body. Structures could disappear overnight and without warning, raze
d or carried off during our sleep. The land that had been Oak Haven trailer park was now bare, its out-of-the way status perfect for illegal dumping executed by people who were bold enough to do it in daytime. Eventually, it became an official business, junk cars lifted between steel maws and crushed, stacked high like game chips. The junk was winning. The short end of Wilson had become more industrial than residential. The view from our windows changed: a solid fence of salvaged sheet metal rose up around the junk, blocking one terrible view with another. The houses, hapless bystanders, could not make the ugly beautiful.

  Joyce Davis and her family simply moved out one day, relocating to Gentilly, a middle-class neighborhood on the city side of the Industrial Canal. As if to dramatize their departure, the Davises’ home was demolished days after they left in what felt like a single swipe, leaving a square patch of concrete that looked too small to ever have held a house. Three houses were left on our side of the street.

  Some Sundays, we drove around looking at properties listed for sale in the newspaper. Karen mostly took the lead, urging Mom on. I remember the yellow highlighter on folded newsprint. Karen’s blue Toyota packed and dragging the ground with the weight of us, Karen and Mom in the front. Me and Karen’s two children, Melvin and Brittany, in the back. We drove to the marked addresses, but we never left the car to go inside the open houses. It was as if the sight of another, more promising space might instantly destroy our ability to continue living in the Yellow House. What if we weren’t able to achieve the new dream house after seeing it? Then we would be stuck not only in the falling-down house, but even worse, in the falling-down house cradling a vision of what it could and should be.

  If only, if only, if only.

  We knew what dreams cost; we had been doing it—dreaming and paying—all of our lives. My private school cost us lights and home repairs and food on the table sometimes. Unrealized dreams could pummel you, if you weren’t careful.