Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (8 page)

“Well, I didn’t say it to him,” my father said.

“It’s the same thing. You talk shit to my son and I’ll talk shit to yours.”

“Oh, come on,” my father said. “There’s no need for that kind of language.”

They started talking at the same time, and when my father raised his voice Lance accused him of shouting. “You can’t yell at me,” he said. “Plantation days are over. I’m not your slave.” This was played to the balcony, his arms cast toward the neighboring windows.

“Who are you talking to?” my father asked.

“You think I’m just some nigger you can shout at? Is that what you’re saying, that I’m a nigger? Are you calling me a nigger?”

I had never heard my father use this word, so it was doubly unfair for Lance to put it into his mouth. People would talk, and in time it would seem that my father had called Lance a nigger. This is the nature of storytelling, and nothing can be done about it.

“You’re out of your mind,” my father said.

“Oh, so now I’m a crazy nigger. Is that it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but you’re thinking it.”

My father abandoned his good manners. “You’re full of crap,” he said.

“Oh, so I’m a liar?”

They were inches apart now, the toes of their shoes almost touching. In the distance, I could see Belinda standing at her window, and Chester standing at his. Regina Potts, Donald Pullman: all of them had the same eager expression. Were someone threatening my landlord, I’d have been thrilled, too, but this was my father we were talking about, and so I hated them for looking so thoroughly entertained.

I don’t remember what prompted my father and Lance to cool down, but it happened, gradually, like a kettle taken off the burner. Balled fists slackened to hands, the distance between them grew wider, and little by little their voices lowered to a normal register. My immediate sensation was relief. I didn’t have to do anything. I had been spared the indignity, the responsibility, of watching my father engage in a fight. The thought of him throwing a punch was bad enough, but the thought of him losing — my father pressed to the ground, my father calling out in pain or surprise — was unbearable.

My new worry was that this was not over. We’d gotten through today, but what would happen the next time Lance and my father ran into each other? A person who wore cowboy boots and cut down trees in order to displace birds was likely capable of anything: a surprise attack, loosened lug nuts, a firebomb. They were reasonable fears, but if any of them occurred to my father, he did not show it. When Lance walked away, he simply put on his gloves and went back to work, as if this had been just any ordinary interruption — Chester wanting him to check a leaky faucet, the Barrett sisters asking if we could come and clean out their gutters. It may have been different for Lance, but my father didn’t live like this. There were no shoving matches at IBM or the Raleigh Country Club, and while he was aggressive in smaller ways — ramming people’s carts at the grocery store, yelling at other drivers to get a Seeing Eye dog — I think it had been a long time since he had seriously considered a fight. All he said was “Can you beat that?” and then he shook his head and revved up the chain saw.

The sun was setting as we piled the logs into the bed of the truck. My father fished the keys from his pocket, and we sat in the cab for a few minutes before heading home. Over at Minnie Edwards’s, a child opened the door to a live-in boyfriend who was not supposed to be there. This sort of thing was of interest to the welfare department, especially when the boyfriend held a job and contributed to the running of the household. Every so often, a caseworker would come around, looking for men’s clothing or evidence of wild spending, and it was assumed that my family shared this interest. The man entered Minnie’s apartment, and a moment later she stepped outside and gestured to my father to roll down his window. “He’s my brother,” she said. “Home from the army.” All this hiding. All this exhausting explanation.

“So what do you think?” my father said. He wasn’t talking about Lance or Minnie Edwards’s boyfriend, but all of it. Everything before us was technically ours — the lawns, the houses, the graveled driveways. This was what ingenuity had bought: a corner of the world that could, in time, expand, growing lot by lot until you could drive for some distance and never lose your feelings of guilt and uncertainty.

Lance and his family would eventually leave the apartment, but not before what had seemed to be a perfectly fine bathroom ceiling fell with no provocation upon his wife’s head. She would limp into court, ridiculous and so predictable with her bandages and neck brace, but the jury would fall for it and award her a settlement. We’d later hear that the two of them had broken up. That he had taken off with someone else. That she was changing beds in a hotel. Chester, too, would eventually break up with his wife and leave with not just the appliances but the storm windows as well.

Troubles moved on only to be replaced by new ones, and looking out the windshield, my father seemed to see them all: the woman whose son would set fire to his bedroom, the man who’d throw a car battery through his neighbor’s window, a frenetic blur of hostile tenants, dismantling his empire brick by brick.

“I was going to help you out if Lance, you know, hit you or anything,” I said.

“Of course you were,” my father said, and for a moment he even allowed himself to believe it. “The guy didn’t know what he was up against, did he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“The two of us together, man oh man, what a sight that would have been!” We laughed then, Vespasian and Titus in the cab of a Toyota pickup. My father patted my knee and then pulled the truck away from the curb. “I’ll give you a check when we get home,” he said. “But don’t think I’m going to pay you for standing there with your mouth open. It doesn’t work that way. Not with me it doesn’t.”

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

The Girl Next Door

W ELL, THAT LITTLE EXPERIMENT IS OVER,“ my mother said. ”You tried it, it didn’t work out, so what do you say we just move on.“ She was dressed in her roll-up-the-shirtsleeves outfit: the faded turquoise skirt, a cotton head scarf, and one of the sporty blouses my father had bought in the hope she might take up golf. ”We’ll start with the kitchen,“ she said. ”That’s always the best way, isn’t it."

I was moving again. This time because of the neighbors.

“Oh, no,” my mother said. “They’re not to blame. Let’s be honest now.” She liked to take my problems back to the source, which was usually me. Like, for instance, when I got food poisoning it wasn’t the chef’s fault. “You’re the one who wanted to go Oriental. You’re the one who ordered the lomain.”

“Lo mein. It’s two words.”

“Oh, he speaks Chinese now! Tell me, Charlie Chan, what’s the word for six straight hours of vomiting and diarrhea?”

What she meant was that I’d tried to save money. The cheap Chinese restaurant, the seventy-five-dollar-a-month apartment: “Cut corners and it’ll always come back to bite you in the ass.” That was one of her sayings. But if you didn’t have money how could you not cut corners?

“And whose fault is it that you don’t have any money? I’m not the one who turned up his nose at a full-time job. I’m not the one who spends his entire paycheck down at the hobby shop.”

“I understand that.”

“Well, good,” she said, and then we began to wrap the breakables.

In my version of the story, the problem began with the child next door, a third-grader who, according to my mother, was bad news right from the start. “Put it together,” she’d said when I first called to tell her about it. “Take a step back. Think.”

But what was there to think about? She was a nine-year-old girl.

“Oh, they’re the worst,” my mother said. “What’s her name? Brandi? Well, that’s cheap, isn’t it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but aren’t I talking to someone who named her daughter Tiffany?”

“My hands were tied!” she shouted. “The damned Greeks had me against the wall and you know it.”

“Whatever you say.”

“So this girl,” my mother continued — and I knew what she would ask before she even said it. “What does her father do?”

I told her there wasn’t a father, at least not one that I knew about, and then I waited as she lit a fresh cigarette. “Let’s see,” she said. “Nine-year-old girl named after an alcoholic beverage. Single mother in a neighborhood the police won’t even go to. What else have you got for me?” She spoke as if I’d formed these people out of clay, as if it were my fault that the girl was nine years old and her mother couldn’t keep a husband. “I don’t suppose this woman has a job, does she?”

“She’s a bartender.”

“Oh, that’s splendid,” my mother said. “Go on.”

The woman worked nights and left her daughter alone from four in the afternoon until two or three in the morning. Both were blond, their hair almost white, with invisible eyebrows and lashes. The mother darkened hers with pencil, but the girl appeared to have none at all. Her face was like the weather in one of those places with no discernible seasons. Every now and then, the circles beneath her eyes would shade to purple. She might show up with a fat lip or a scratch on her neck but her features betrayed nothing.

You had to feel sorry for a girl like that. No father, no eyebrows, and that mother. Our apartments shared a common wall, and every night I’d hear the woman stomping home from work. Most often she was with someone, but whether alone or with company she’d find some excuse to bully her daughter out of bed. Brandi had left a doughnut on the TV or Brandi had forgotten to drain her bathwater. They’re important lessons to learn, but there’s something to be said for leading by example. I never went into their apartment, but what I saw from the door was pretty rough — not simply messy or chaotic, but hopeless, the lair of a depressed person.

Given her home life, it wasn’t surprising that Brandi latched onto me. A normal mother might have wondered what was up — her nine-year-old daughter spending time with a twenty-six-year-old man — but this one didn’t seem to care. I was just free stuff to her: a free babysitter, a free cigarette machine, the whole store. I’d hear her through the wall sometimes: “Hey, go ask your friend for a roll of toilet paper.” “Go ask your friend to make you a sandwich.” If company was coming and she wanted to be alone, she’d kick the girl out. “Why don’t you go next door and see what your little playmate is up to?”

Before I moved in, Brandi’s mother had used the couple downstairs, but you could tell that the relationship had soured. Next to the grocery carts chained to their porch was a store-bought sign, the NO TRESPASSING followed by a handwritten “This meens you, Brandi!!!!”

There was a porch on the second floor as well, with one door leading to Brandi’s bedroom and another door leading to mine. Technically, the two apartments were supposed to share it, but the entire thing was taken up with their junk, and so I rarely used it.

“I can’t wait until you get out of your little slumming phase,” my mother had said on first seeing the building. She spoke as if she’d been raised in splendor, but in fact her childhood home had been much worse. The suits she wore, the delicate bridges holding her teeth in place — it was all an invention. “You live in bad neighborhoods so you can feel superior,” she’d say, the introduction, always, to a fight. “The point is to move up in the world. Even sideways will do in a pinch, but what’s the point in moving down?”

As a relative newcomer to the middle class, she worried that her children might slip back into the world of public assistance and bad teeth. The finer things were not yet in our blood, or at least that was the way she saw it. My thrift-shop clothing drove her up the wall, as did the secondhand mattress lying without benefit of box springs upon my hardwood floor. “It’s not ironic,” she’d say. “It’s not ethnic. It’s filthy.”

Bedroom suites were fine for people like my parents, but as an artist I preferred to rough it. Poverty lent my little dabblings a much-needed veneer of authenticity, and I imagined myself repaying the debt by gently lifting the lives of those around me, not en masse but one by one, the old-fashioned way. It was, I thought, the least I could do.

I told my mother that I had allowed Brandi into my apartment, and she sighed deeply into her end of the telephone. “And I bet you gave her the grand tour, didn’t you? Mr. Show-Off. Mr. Big Shot.” We had a huge fight over that one. I didn’t call her for two days. Then the phone rang. “Brother,” she said. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”

A neglected girl comes to your door and what are you supposed to do, turn her away?

“Exactly,” my mother said. “Throw her the hell out.”

But I couldn’t. What my mother defined as boasting, I considered a standard show-and-tell. “This is my stereo system,” I’d said to Brandi. “This is the electric skillet I received last Christmas, and here’s a little something I picked up in Greece last summer.” I thought I was exposing her to the things a regular person might own and appreciate, but all she heard was the possessive. “This is my honorable-mention ribbon,” meaning “It belongs to me. It’s not yours.” Every now and then I’d give her a little something, convinced that she’d treasure it forever. A postcard of the Acropolis, prestamped envelopes, packaged towelettes bearing the insignia of Olympic Airlines. “Really?” she’d say. “For me?”

The only thing she owned, the only thing special, was a foot-tall doll in a clear plastic carrying case. It was a dime-store version of one of those Dolls from Many Countries, this one Spanish with a beet red dress and a droopy mantilla on her head. Behind her, printed on cardboard, was the place where she lived: a pinata-lined street snaking up the hill to a dusty bullring. The doll had been given to her by her grandmother, who was forty years old and lived in a trailer beside an army base.

“What is this?” my mother asked. “A skit from Hee Haw? Who the hell are these people?”

“These people,” I said, “are my neighbors, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t make fun of them. The grandmother doesn’t need it, I don’t need it, and I’m pretty sure a nine-year-old-girl doesn’t need it, either.” I didn’t tell her that the grandmother was nicknamed Rascal or that, in the picture Brandi showed me, the woman was wearing cutoff shorts and an ankle bracelet.

“We don’t talk to her anymore,” Brandi had said when I handed back the picture. “She’s out of our life, and we’re glad of it.” Her voice was dull and robotic, and I got the impression that the line had been fed to her by her mother. She used a similar tone when introducing her doll. “She’s not for playing with. She’s for display.”

Whoever imposed this rule had obviously backed it up with a threat. Brandi would trace her finger along the outside of the box, tempting herself, but never once did I see her lift the lid. It was as if the doll would explode if removed from her natural environment. Her world was the box, and a strange world it was.

“See,” Brandi said one day, “she’s on her way home to cook up those clams.”

She was talking about the castanets dangling from the doll’s wrist. It was a funny thought, childish, and I probably should have let it go rather than playing the know-it-all. “If she were an American doll those might be clams,” I said. “But instead she’s from Spain, and those are called castanets.” I wrote the word on a piece of paper. “Castanets, look it up.”

“She’s not from Spain, she’s from Fort Bragg.”

“Well, maybe she was bought there,” I said. “But she’s supposed to be Spanish.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” It was hard to tell without the eyebrows, but I think she was mad at me.

“It’s not supposed to mean anything,” I said. “It’s just true.”

“You’re full of it. There’s no such place.”

“Sure there is,” I said. “It’s right next to France.”

“Yeah, right. What’s that, a store?”

I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. How could you not know that Spain was a country? Even if you were nine years old, it seems you would have picked it up on TV or something. “Oh, Brandi,” I said. “We’ve got to find you a map.”

Because I couldn’t do it any other way, we fell into a tight routine. I had a part-time construction job and would return home at exactly 5:30. Five minutes later Brandi would knock on my door, and stand there blinking until I let her in. I was going through a little wood-carving phase at the time, whittling figures whose heads resembled the various tools I worked with during the day: a hammer, a hatchet, a wire brush. Before beginning, I’d arrange some paper and colored pencils on my desk. “Draw your doll,” I’d say. “Copy the bullring in her little environment. Express yourself!” I encouraged Brandi to broaden her horizons, but she usually quit after the first few minutes, claiming it was too much work.

Mainly she observed, her eyes shifting between my knife and the Spanish doll parked before her on the desktop. She’d talk about how stupid her teachers were, and then she’d ask what I would do if I had a million dollars. If I’d had a million dollars at that time in my life I probably would have spent every last penny of it on drugs, but I didn’t admit it, because I wanted to set a good example. “Let’s see,” I’d say. “If I had that kind of money, I’d probably give it away.”

“Yeah, right. You’d what, just hand it out to people on the street?”

“No, I’d set up a foundation and try to make a difference in people’s lives.” At this one even the doll was gagging.

When asked what she’d do with a million dollars, Brandi described cars and gowns and heavy bracelets encrusted with gems.

“But what about others? Don’t you want to make them happy?”

“No. I want to make them jealous.”

“You don’t mean that,” I’d say.