Seen It All and Done the Rest (8 page)

TWELVE

W
hen Zora got home at ten thirty, I was in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on what I knew was one of her favorite meals: roast chicken with lemon and tarragon butter, green beans with almonds, and new potatoes. I had also picked up a loaf of crusty French bread, and for dessert, baked apples with whipped cream. The landlord’s kitchen was well organized, well equipped, and a pleasure to work in, even for an amateur like me. I’ve always loved to cook for my friends, and Zora and I had spent a lot of time together in the kitchen. Judging from her dramatic weight loss, she hadn’t spent many hours there lately.

I had found a multidisc CD player in the front room and programmed it for random selections, curious about what might come up for my listening pleasure. Exploring somebody’s music is as revealing as poking through their closet, and usually a lot more fun. By the time Zora arrived, I had heard everybody from Louis Armstrong to Buckwheat Zydeco and enjoyed them all. I was basting the chicken, singing along loudly to Bob Marley’s “Exodus,” and wishing I had the patience to grow dreadlocks when she walked in. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and headed straight for the freezer.

“Hey, darlin’,” I said, closing the oven door and figuring another thirty-five minutes should do it. “Welcome home. You hungry?”

“I didn’t know you were cooking,” she said, pouring herself a drink. “I grabbed a sandwich a couple of hours ago.”

“No problem,” I said, willing to bet she hadn’t eaten anything, although I could smell the vodka already on her breath when she kissed me. “You can sit with me while you have your drink.”

“I don’t think I’d be very good company,” she said, tossing a copy of
Dig It!
on the kitchen counter in front of me. It was today’s issue and there she was on the cover, standing in Paschal’s draped in my luggage, looking stressed out and skinny, next to a picture of herself looking like she used to, happy, healthy, and effortlessly beautiful.

Scandal takes its toll!
The headline blared.
Dig It! exclusive. What a difference a year makes!

“What is this?” I said, confused.

“There’s more,” she said. “Page six.”

I flipped to it and there we both were, sitting in Paschal’s, talking intensely. The pictures weren’t great, but they were accurate. Zora looked terrible and I looked concerned. Movie people always say that the camera doesn’t lie, and in this case they were right.

At the bottom was a reproduction of the cover photos with comments about the change in her appearance, complete with arrows pointing out the contrast.
Breasts: Last year, full and firm. This year, shrunken and sunken. Booty: Last year, best in show. This year, where’d it go?

I was outraged at the invasion of her privacy and mystified as to the possible photographer. “Where did they get these?”

“Probably the waiter.”

“MacArthur?” I couldn’t believe it. “Why would he?”

“Because they pay good money for this crap.” She practically spit out the words.

“He didn’t seem like that kind of guy,” I said.

Hair,
said the copy next to an arrow pointing at Zora’s severe little ponytail.
Last year, perfect perm. This year, mystery mess.

“I can’t believe they got it out this fast!”

Zora looked at me for a minute and took a swallow of her drink. “You still don’t get it, Mafeenie. It’s different now. It’s fast and it’s vicious and it never stops!”

“Welcome to the world,” I said, wishing she wasn’t already high. Talking to a drunk is counterproductive. Afterward they never remember what you said.

“All right, Mafeenie,” she said. “I think now’s a good time to show you my room.” She nodded at the tabloid on the counter. “Bring that, will you?”

I followed her up the stairs, wondering what I would find behind that closed door. It had taken all my strength not to open it this afternoon, just enough to take a peek inside, but I couldn’t have lived with myself after that kind of betrayal of trust. Sure, I was worried about Zora’s state of mind, and sure, I was a believer in grandmother privilege, but not enough to risk alienating her forever.

When we got to the door of her room, I thought she might pause for some kind of warning like
don’t touch anything,
or
it doesn’t bite,
but she walked right in like she had nothing to hide. The room was a little smaller than mine, and it didn’t have a view of the pool, but from what I could see, there were no snakes under the neatly made bed at all, just two packing boxes and a pair of fluffy pink slippers. On the nightstand was a photograph of me, one of her and Jasmine on the back deck of the motel, one of her father in costume for his one and only Broadway show, and one of her with Howard in front of the theater in Amsterdam. She set her glass on the dresser and leaned down to pull out the boxes. Curious, I stood there holding the rolled-up copy of today’s
Dig It!
and awaiting further instructions.

“Pick one,” she said.

“What are they?”

“Just pick one. Any one. Any one at all.”

She slurred that just enough to make me cringe so I reached down and pulled out the first thing my fingers touched. It was another copy of
Dig It!
The front cover was split in half, they seemed to like that effect, with a picture of Zora on one side and on the other side, a picture of the murdered vet. He was wearing an army uniform and holding a huge automatic weapon in one hand and what looked like a joint in the other. The headline said:
Doomed vet well known as battlefield doper!
The date at the top was last summer.

Zora was watching me, but she offered no explanation.

“Are they all
Dig It!
’s?”

“It comes out every day,” she said. “You’d be surprised how fast they accumulate.”

She plucked the back issue and the new one from my hands and knelt to quickly tuck them into place.

“The new one goes in at the back of the section,” she said. “The old one resumes its position between
Mystery coed’s ties to dead gangster target of police probe
and
Dead vet’s shocking secret life lead to coed ultimatum.
”

She was right about one thing. The sheer volume of the coverage was a sickening surprise to me. No wonder she was overwhelmed. She stood up again, reached for her drink, and took a big swallow. When she looked back at me, her lips were set in a tight line. Turns out Zora had snakes under her bed after all.

“Why are you keeping this stuff?” I said. “Aren’t you the one who called it a bunch of trash?”

“It’s history,” she said. “Maybe I’ll show them to my kids one day.”

“Why would you do that?”

She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe to show them that life is more complicated than they think it is.”

I resisted the impulse to tell her life is always more complicated than you think it is. I also resisted a strong impulse to kick the box over. “Why do you care what these idiots say?”

“Because people believe what they read whether it’s true or not.”

“What difference does it make? People who know you don’t think it’s true.”

“Which would be fine if all I had to do was hang around with people I already know, except that’s not the kind of job I have, remember? It’s not like I’m a librarian, Mafeenie. I don’t just do counseling, I’m starting to represent the organization at conferences and hearings. This kind of crap just makes it hard for anybody to take me seriously.”

This wasn’t something we had to settle before dinner, but the idea of her pushing those boxes of bullshit back under her bed didn’t sit well with me. Sleeping people are so vulnerable because all our defenses are down. Curling up nightly on top of two years’ worth of lies and garbage couldn’t possibly be good.

Zora sighed deeply. “I practically had to beg my boss for a chance to do the big presentation downtown tomorrow, even though it’s my idea, and now this comes out.” She shook her head. “I’ll be surprised if he still lets me do it.”

She looked miserable and resigned, a dangerous, enervating combination.

“It’s bad luck to keep that much negative energy around,” I said.

Zora looked like she was trying to decide whether or not to remind me that I had agreed to butt out of her business, so I jumped in with a preemptive strike and a smile. “It’s my job to spot the snakes, remember?”

She drained her glass and set it down on the nightstand beside the picture of her dad. “I can put them downstairs in Amelia’s office with the others if they bother you up here.”

The others?
“I’ll help,” I said, picking up the smaller box. It was heavier than I thought it would be as I followed her back downstairs, puffing just a little in spite of myself. “Ever consider burning?”

“Burning?”

“I’m a big fan of burning,” I said, remembering how much I always enjoyed doing the climactic scene in
Hedda Gabbler
when the distraught heroine feeds her faithless lover’s manuscript into the fireplace, crying out “I am burning our child, I am burning our child,” as the only copy goes up in flames.

“Even when I kept a journal, I’d write in it every night when I got home from the theater and burn the pages first thing in the morning.”

“What was the point?”

“I didn’t want to drop dead and leave that much incriminating evidence behind.”

I was only half teasing. Things that start private should stay private.

“Then why bother to write it down at all?”

“The process was what mattered,” I said. “It wasn’t like I needed to go back and read any of that stuff again.”

“What if you forgot something?” she said, flipping on the light in the neat little office we’d only poked our heads into during my initial tour of the premises. She put her box down carefully beside two others next to a beige three-drawer file cabinet. I slid mine in beside it, wishing I had the nerve to feed them all into the jumbo-size shredder I could see near the landlord’s desk.

“Then I’d just have to make it up as I went along,” I said, stretching my arms above my head to get the crick out of my back. I should have bent my knees before I picked up that much weight.

“That doesn’t seem to be working so well for me,” Zora said, turning out the light again and heading for the kitchen where dinner was waiting for me and another drink was calling to her.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll work on it.”

THIRTEEN

E
verything turned out great, if I do say so myself, but Zora drank her dinner anyway. Meanwhile, I tried to distract her from
Dig It!
by telling her about my day.

“I ran into an old friend at the West End News this morning,” I said. “She knows you.”

“Everybody around here knows everybody else. Who’s your friend?”

“Abbie Browning.”

“Miss Abbie? Where do you know her from?”

“We were friends in Paris a long time ago. I haven’t seen her in thirty years and we picked right up like we’d seen each other last week.”

“I like her,” Zora said. “She’s really spiritual. Sort of like a moon worshiper.”

“Smile when you say that, or I’ll tell your mom,” I said.

“Actually, she reminds me a little of Mom,” Zora said, tearing off a chunk of bread and nibbling it delicately. “But she’s a little more organized. She’s got cards and stuff.”

“What kind of cards?” I imagined a line of inspirational stationery of the kind Maya Angelou agreed to put her poems on.

“Business cards,” Zora said. “They’re blue and they say ‘visionary advisor.’”

“Is she any good?”

“I don’t know, why? Are you looking for some visionary advice?”

“Always,” I said. “She invited us for dinner on Sunday. I’d love for you to go.”

“I might have to work on Sunday.” Zora headed for the freezer and poured another splash of vodka over the ice that hadn’t had time to melt. “If I can get off, I’ll come.”

“You work on Sundays, too?”

She closed the freezer and sat back down. “You used to do two shows on Sunday.”

She had me there. “Abbie was driving down to Tybee with another woman who knows you.”

“I told you,” she said. “Everybody knows everybody.”

“Her name is Aretha Hargrove. She’s a photographer.”

“I know. She took most of the pictures in here.”

I had enjoyed spending the afternoon with the smiling faces who had turned toward her camera. The thing that struck me immediately was how happy they all looked. She seemed to have a talent for capturing the moment when joy is visible on the human face. The photograph they were taking down to Peachy was no exception.

“She’s good,” I said.

“She used to have a studio upstairs from my apartment. We worked in the garden together sometimes. Was Joyce Ann with her?”

“Who’s Joyce Ann?”

“Her daughter. She’s almost four. I used to babysit for her sometimes, but she gave up her studio and I moved out of that building, so we kind of lost touch.”

“Even in this tiny town?”

Zora shrugged. “I’ve been working such crazy hours.”

I started to clear the table, hoping I could tempt Zora wih a rosy baked apple and a big dollop of freshly whipped cream. “She seemed nice. Want some dessert?”

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ll stick with what I’ve got.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, taking the smallest apple for myself and not going overboard on the cream.

Zora watched me munching and tinkled her ice cubes. “Aretha’s probably been in
Dig It!
more than I have.”

“What’s she doing in that rag?”

Zora looked surprised. “Don’t you recognize her name?”

I shook my head. “Why would I?”

“Married son of mayoral hopeful charged in death of gay deserter.”

“What does that mean?” I was still confused.

“The married son. That was Kwame. Her husband.”

I practically dropped my spoon. If West End was a small town, it seemed to be a lot closer to Peyton Place than it was to Mayberry.

“Are they still married?”

Zora shook her head. “She divorced him, but he still sees Joyce Ann.”

Nothing about Aretha said trauma or drama or terminal disappointment the way everything about Zora did. I wondered how she managed to avoid the emotional quicksand that was sucking the life out of my favorite munchkin. Maybe she’d gotten some of Abbie’s visionary advice. I hoped I’d have a chance to ask her.

Zora yawned and stretched. “Well, now that I’ve brought you up-to-date on everything, I’ve got an early day again tomorrow, so…”

“What time will you be home?” I said. “Or will this be a late night, too?”

I didn’t mean to sound judgmental, but I probably did because Zora frowned.

“Mafeenie, I told you I’d be working weird hours.”

“I know you did, darlin’. I was just hoping you could go by the duplex with me tomorrow. It’s just up on Martin Luther King, right near Washington High School.”

She looked uncomfortable. “Do you need me to go with you?”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t have a car and if I can avoid the bus, I’d like to.”

“No, no! You know I wouldn’t ask you to take the bus, Mafeenie, but I can’t get off tomorrow. I was thinking you could drop me off at work and keep the car. I’ll get a ride home.”

Now it was my turn to hesitate. I hadn’t driven a car in Atlanta in years and even though I had a valid license, I wasn’t sure I wanted to navigate Atlanta’s notoriously fast freeways all alone just yet. On the other hand, I didn’t have to use the freeway to get where I was going.

“You sure I can’t talk you into coming with me? I promise it won’t take long, and who knows? Once we get things organized, you might even want to live there after your landlord gets back.”

Zora looked at me strangely, but she didn’t say anything.

“What?” I said, not confident of my ability to correctly interpret her expression.

“Nothing, I just…I don’t want you to hold on to it because you think I’m ever going to live there,” she said firmly but gently, like she didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

“I was just throwing the idea out,” I said. “I can keep renting it like I always have. We’ll have some tenants in there by the time you’re back at Spelman next year, and after that, you can—”

“I’m not going back to Spelman,” she interrupted me.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, drawing out every word, “that I’ve decided I don’t want to be in school right now. There’s too much work to do on the outside. People over there going to class like they don’t even know there’s a war on!”

She made a sweeping gesture that I assumed was meant to include her former classmates, many of whom were dedicated activists just like she was, tackling issues of war and rap music with equal determination. She was still holding her drink and when she flung out her arm, she splashed some of it on the spotless kitchen floor, where it landed with a liquidy
plop.

I looked at her. Drinking too much was stupid, but dropping out of college in your senior year was just crazy. “What did your mother say?”

“It’s not her decision,” Zora said, raising her little chin defiantly. “It’s mine.”

I took a deep breath. “I know it’s your decision, darlin’. I just wondered if you had shared it with Jasmine yet.”

“Not yet,” Zora said. “I wanted to tell you first.”

“Why?”

Suddenly she leaned forward and her eyes filled up with tears. She blinked them back, but she couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice. “Because I want to do what you did, Mafeenie! I want to leave all this bullshit behind and go far enough away to start a life where nobody knows who I am or what I’ve been.”

This was, of course, not an entirely accurate description of what I had done. I found my freedom in a place I stumbled upon by the grace of the goddess, and I had enough sense to stay there and be the woman I was born to be. I wasn’t running from anything and I never had the slightest intention of constructing a life where nobody knew who I was or what I’d been up to. But all that was beside the point.

“I want…” She stopped and shook her head slowly.

I leaned across the table and touched her hand lightly. “What?”

She looked at me, her face a mask of vodka-fueled misery. “I want my old life back,” she whispered. “I just want my old life back.”

“Oh, darlin’,” I said as the tears splashed over her cheeks. I got up and went around to sit beside her, pulling her close, patting her back gently like she was a baby who needed a burp. “Oh, my poor baby.”

When I was a kid, I once saw a TV drama about a mother whose beloved son is killed in a terrible accident. When she has an opportunity to have one wish granted, the heartbroken woman unhesitatingly wishes that her son would come back from the dead, and he does, just as mangled and battered and unrecognizable as he was when he breathed his last breath. The expression on the mother’s horrified face when she hears his halting footsteps on the porch and runs to throw open the door stayed with me to this day. The lesson about the impossibility of going back stayed with me, too.

“Listen, darlin’,” I said, leaning back but keeping my arm around her shoulders. “Your old life wasn’t perfect either. It just looks that way in retrospect.”

She brushed the tears from her face and sniffled. “But at least nobody was watching.”

“Somebody’s always watching,” I said. “The trick is to give them something interesting to look at. Put on a strapless dress! Sing something!”

She gave me a crooked little grin. “You know I can’t sing, Mafeenie.”

“That’s the other trick.”

“What?”

“If you can’t sing, start dancing!”