All This Could Be Yours

by Jami Attenberg

  And she was happy to be there, as many problems as this city had. The potholes and the drugs and the violence and the corruption, not to mention the economic inequality, which didn’t affect her directly, her job paid her well. But of course it did affect her—how could you be a human being and not be affected? Plus, she had cousins, family, people who struggled, and she did the best she could to provide them with love and support and wisdom and money. People were out there killing themselves, though.

  Every once in a while, she remembered with fondness her suburban existence out east. Sushi rolls in mini-malls, the cool efficiency of the Metro, a gym membership she barely used. Her best friend, Tamara, was always dragging her to spa days, and cocktail hours, and sample sales, all for young black professionals like themselves. Tamara with her fake eyelashes and girlish laughter and immaculate suits and high-paid consulting gigs for various lobbying organizations. They double-dated more than once, but always enjoyed each other’s company the most. She was good people, and that was a good time.

  Now Sharon was back in it. Half the pipes on her block froze one winter, and the neighborhood lost power with regularity during hurricane season. One morning her car got shot out, one bullet through the rear window that lodged itself in the back of the driver’s seat, right where her head would have been if she had been driving. As she drove the car to the repair shop, each bump knocked out more shards in the rear window, the tinkling sound as the glass collapsed both satisfying and chilling. Another morning her young cousin Jazmine took a bullet in the leg in the Lower Ninth as she walked to catch a bus to her first day of junior year of high school. Bullets don’t care what they hit; they just hit. Still, Sharon knew her neighbors, and they greeted one another on the street, and the neighborhood was a living, breathing entity, and she loved this city, and the flaws defined her even as she had to contend with them. She didn’t mean to overromanticize it. She just knew her own truth.

  But there was that fence. For some reason, in the past few months—was it six now?—her neighbor had let his backyard go to hell. She supposed he had stopped paying whoever was taking care of the house. A cheap bastard, no surprise. Or maybe he was defaulting on the mortgage. Maybe it wasn’t worth it for him to keep it up. Now there were weeds everywhere, powered by summer rains and sunshine. And though the gaps were narrow between the planks, insidious, monstrous cat’s-claw vines snuck through them anyway, taking over her fence, sprouting directly from his backyard to hers, and beneath them, too, assaulting her grass and flowers and fruit trees and vegetable beds. No matter how much she sprayed them, they refused to die. She plucked and snipped them, and the next day they grew back. They were unstoppable, and it was all his fault.

  What was a house to this man? Nothing. His investment properties were movable parts, that’s all. To him there were no neighborhoods, no neighbors. And he wasn’t even good at it, she thought. He was a bad homeowner. What a waste in a city that desperately needed affordable housing. There was nothing she could do about it. But those damn vines, destroying her fence, seeping into her garden, weeds everywhere. She couldn’t tolerate it. She wouldn’t tolerate it any longer.

  Some of her neighbors had been standing out in front of her house in the early evening. She strolled over to them as she walked back from the bus stop. Nadine, still in her beautician’s apron from the shop on the corner, said there had been a shooting on Pauline Street. A kid she knew, not well, but she’d seen him around.

  “Did he shoot or did he get shot?” Sharon said.

  “He had the gun, is what they’re saying,” said Nadine.

  It was the third shooting this week, but the first time someone had gotten hit. The ladies clucked their tongues. They’d seen it all before. Sometimes it was a turf war, those things went back a long time, or a drug deal gone bad. Other times it was kids who just needed to go back to school already; summer had seemed to stretch on forever. That was when the young people got into trouble, when they didn’t have anywhere to go, anything to do. Too much time on their hands.

  Now the ladies were judging her neighbor’s house, the overgrown alleyway, a waist-high thicket of weeds lining the property and beyond. And was that front porch beginning to crumble and chip? A mess and a shame, they all declared.

  “Don’t I know it,” said Sharon. “I think about it all the time.” There’s nobody who thinks about it more than I do, she thought.

  “They should have someone around here take care of it,” said Layla, who lived directly across the street. “I got a nephew who could use the work.”

  Nadine studied the façade. “Only a matter of time before the house goes, too,” she said.

  Everyone agreed with her, offered some sympathy to Sharon, yet she felt judged by them anyway, though it couldn’t possibly be her fault.

  The ladies knew her, and they didn’t. She’d grown up with some of them, or their children, but because she had gone to Ben Franklin High, the magnet school across town, she’d always felt a divide between them. And, of course, she went away for a long time after that, for all her schooling, and then life in DC. It was inevitable they would feel different about her than the people who had stayed here the whole time and had lived through Katrina. But she’d been home for ten years now. And she was back for good, couldn’t they see that?

  Sharon’s cousin Roxie showed up, pulling a small cart, selling cornbread and brownies. They exchanged pleasantries, commented on the heat, agreed it got worse every year, started getting hotter earlier, stayed hotter later. Somebody made a joke about global warming, but it wasn’t funny so much as true. “What are you going to do about it,” Sharon said, expecting no response. Doom had been upon them since day one, in one way or another. Not much political talk, no point in it. There was a new mayor—the first black female mayor—and everyone was sitting back and letting her do a job for a minute. Give her a shot, why not.

  Nadine shuffled back to the beauty shop, mourning the state of that house one more time. “That house used to be something,” she said. “For a long time, it was something.”

  They’d all worked hard on that block to repair and then keep their houses intact after the storm, not only Sharon and her parents, but these women and their families. To see one go to hell like that was a shame. Who wanted more blight in this city? It was making her insane, but what could she do about it? It was his land, not hers. His right to destroy it, as it was her right to maintain hers.

  She hadn’t just sat there and tolerated it, of course. She had left a note on her neighbor’s front door, only to see it sit there for a week before it got blown off by a storm. Then she had written a letter, in hopes of it getting forwarded, but once she peeked in the front door and saw a stack of bills piled at the foot of the mail slot. She searched the internet for contact information, but all she found was an LLC. There was an owner, but there was no neighbor.

  At dusk, everyone had gone inside.

  So many times she’d thought about sneaking into his backyard, but she recognized that among all the other possible ways, this was exactly how black people got shot. But last night, she decided to do it anyway.

  On the one side was her house, and on the other was the beauty shop, windowless, two stories with a rental on top. She felt no one would see her, but she needed to work fast. Her intention was to spray the vines that had spread onto her fence with a weed killer. She brought a handful of trash bags and some shears. She wished she could bring her weed trimmer, but all that noise might draw attention to her being there. She couldn’t imagine one of her neighbors calling the police on her (or really anyone; they didn’t much like the police on that block), but she couldn’t risk it. She had a clean record and work in the morning and she didn’t need a trespassing charge.

  I’m just doing a quick favor for a neighbor, she thought. I’d be grateful if someone did the same for me, took care of my garden while I was out of town. Just neighbors being neighbors, she thought as she slid down the alleyway, past the five-foot-high elephant ears
snaking up from underneath the house.

  Ahead she could see the last of the harvest of the fig tree dangling from its branches. A lime tree was coming in early.

  I should have worn a wig, she thought. So no one would mistake her for a man, in case there was any trouble. She kept her hair short and natural, had given up on fussing with it, it was too expensive, and she felt it held her back in life, and who was it for anyway? She was the one who had to look at her face in the mirror. She was cute, she knew that. For a tall woman, she thought sometimes. People tended to call tall women “handsome,” in her experience, because they got confused by the height. They wanted to make men out of women when they felt physically intimidated. But she had only ever identified as female. She had a cousin in New Orleans East on her father’s side who looked a little like her and was as tall as she was, and he was living as a man now, had a wife, two kids, his own business, respect in the neighborhood—mostly, though there were a few jackasses here and there—and he knew better than to talk openly about his situation in this town, where it could be dangerous for people like him. If you didn’t know how he had started life on this planet, you wouldn’t necessarily question where he had ended up. But why bother questioning things like that anyway? she thought. He was lucky enough that he already knew the answer to what he wanted to be. And he was handsome to the core.

  But Sharon was cute and lean, with those eyes of her mother’s, a pleasant round face, and good, glossy, plum-colored lips. Nearing fifty, and she didn’t have rolls on her stomach or flabby arms. They were strong arms. She was in good shape. She was ready to roll for another fifty years. Look at me, she’d say to herself sometimes, while examining herself in the mirror. I am alive.

  You can be happy about a lot of things in your life, yet just one thing can make you miserable.

  The moon was self-important and disapproving above the disheveled state of the backyard. Some weeds were as high as her waist. She began to wrestle with them, and the thrashing sound seemed loud, and she worried for a moment that someone could hear her, but who would be listening, who cared what happened in this backyard but her? She carried on with feverish intent.

  As she trimmed, she heard her mother talking to her, telling her about the importance of weeding every week. You can’t do it once and then sit back all proud of yourself. No. Every week. Things need to be maintained. Get your hands dirty, Sharon. Nothing’s going to change unless you get your hands in that dirt.

  She pulled huge handfuls, she chopped, she plucked. For a minute, she violently sneezed. All around her the bugs started to gather. She had prepared herself with bug spray, but still she could feel the occasional rush of them against her skin, and she swatted them off. Sharon knew she was doing this for herself, but also this was part of something bigger, this maintenance of the land. One house goes down, who is to say the next one won’t go down, too?

  This seemed predictable to her, that she’d have to use her body to fix something a man had done—especially a white man, if she was being honest here—to keep this city going. She had family members who labored all over New Orleans, were custodians of the city in one way or another, just as she was. An uncle who drove a streetcar, keeping the city moving, even if it was slowly; a cousin who had bartended for decades in the Quarter, for the approval of tourists; cousins who were home caregivers, or who had built houses from the ground up, or who had cooked and cleaned or smiled in one of the many hotels, bars, and restaurants in this city. She had another one who had been working on the ferry for decades, taking dollar bills from strangers, getting people across the river, and sometimes she’d go give him a quick hello, ask after his children, of which he had seven. Hop a ride to the Westbank and back, watch him do his job. Just to be proud of him. She had cousins all over the place. Or rather, everyone felt like her cousin. And a lot of them were working hard.

  We power this city, she thought. We are the bodies, we are the labor.

  She kept chopping. She glanced up at the fig tree. She’d be taking whatever was left on the tree with her that night. Then she flashed on her father leaning on the old chain link fence, a cold beer in his hand, and Mr. Louis barbecuing next door, popping some figs in his mouth, and she ached for times like that. She had loved her parents. Those days are gone, she thought. Alone in this world. A little bit lonely, she supposed. Who among us is not alone? she thought every day at work as she tended to those before her.

  This weekend, her family in New Orleans East was throwing a barbecue for Labor Day, and they had insisted she come because, she suspected, they had a man they wanted her to meet. Some people didn’t like it when you were alone and fine with it. Yes, she was lonely sometimes, but she knew more than enough people who were partnered up, with children, who felt the same. Lonely was something you were born with, she felt. Lonely was about not feeling understood or heard. You could be in a room full of people and still feel that way. That was why she liked church. Because it was the time she set aside to think about God. She didn’t always feel like contemplating God. It was challenging to focus her mind on that specific image, that kind of light in her head. Even if she could, if her mind was open and available, she felt resentful toward God for things that were happening in the world, and had no desire to spend time with him or her or whatever it was. But Sundays, she was ready. And when she thought about God, in the purest moments, she was never alone.

  And there were other times she had company, not that her family knew. There was a man she had been seeing from her work. Not every night, but enough that it felt more than casual. He was a smoker, and that was hard for her to be around sometimes. She knew what it did to a body. When he coughed, and it was thick, it made her shudder, though he would clean up for her on their dates or if he came over late at night. Still, it was on his skin, in his scalp, on his clothes. (She had a heightened sense of smell. She could smell a dead animal half a block away.) But she liked his cologne, and if they’d been drinking, there was something delicious about that intersection of the smoking and the booze and the sweat, always in the nape of his neck. They went to see music together, at Prime Example, out by the track. Sometimes they took drives out of town. It was a kind of a relationship, except he still lived with his ex-wife and his kids, and maybe shared a bed with his ex, too. “But that’s none of my business,” she had told Tamara, who had seemed a little shocked on the phone. It was fine by Sharon, though. Less hassle for her. She didn’t think she wanted much more than they had. Plus, she suspected, no matter what woman he lived with, he’d probably be sneaking out to see someone else.

  She thought of her father, how he reached out his hands to everyone he met. It was strange that she had grown up feeling so alone the way she did, but all souls were different, and there were things she inherited from her parents anyway. Her mother’s eyes, her father’s height, their brains, their determination, their pride in their home. She missed them like crazy. The months she spent with them in DC, and then here, they had settled into a warm and comfortable unit. She organized her life around them, drove them to doctors’ appointments, accompanied them to church, cooked for them when they could no longer cook, and discussed their post-death wishes, so when the time came, her father first and then her mother, she knew they were receiving the exact tribute and final resting they desired. It had been a hard conversation to have, mainly because she had hoped they both would live until they were a hundred years old. But they’d made things simple for her. They’d had the funeral plot picked out for years, at Greenwood, a veteran’s funeral for him. They knew what kind of coffins. They had a budget to cover expenses, which fairly amazed her, though of course she shouldn’t have been surprised. She understood that if she took care of all those things, she would have done right by her family. She wondered who would take care of those things for her when she died. Surely there would be someone in her life then who loved her enough to bury her. Maybe one of her cousin’s kids.

  By now she’d cleared a sizable swath along the fence, had proba
bly bought herself a few months before she’d have to dive in again. But what of the other fences surrounding the yard? What of the house itself? She looked back at the rest of the lawn and knew she couldn’t walk away from it. What’s another hour of her time?

  There had been a small second line for her father when he passed. All the neighborhood ladies had been there. Dressed. The respect Sharon felt that day for her father made her shiver. Tamara flew out for it from DC, and marveled at the public display of grief, while slipping her number to the trombone player in the second-line band. “Y’all know how to mourn,” she said.

  But when it came to her mother’s death, she had insisted she didn’t want as much fuss. Sharon had said, “Mommy, no,” but her mother told her, “When he’s gone, then so am I,” and sure enough, she died three months later. And Sharon was exhausted by then anyway.

  Before she knew it, it was well after ten o’clock. She’d filled five trash bags. The lawn was clean. She gathered some figs into another bag, and snipped off bunches of the overgrown basil and rosemary plants. She’d make some fig jam, she decided, pack it into tiny mason jars, and give it to the neighborhood ladies. She’d pack some of the basil cuttings into planters and hand them out at the upcoming barbecue. Maybe some of her lettuce, too. She didn’t know if anyone used them, or if they ever survived the heat and grew. But it was worth trying. It was something her mother would have done.

  In their lives together, things had been more complicated with her mother than either of them had wanted or expected. Particularly in her thirties. Sharon thought her mother had accepted her choices, admired them, but still would have liked her to settle down and provide her with a grandchild. It wasn’t going to happen, but Sharon didn’t know how to say that out loud, even to herself. In some ways, it was terrifying to think it was going to be her by herself for the rest of her life. Mostly it was freeing. She didn’t quite understand that was the way she felt in her twenties, so she chose not to think about it at all. In her thirties, she began to understand that her mother was angry with her. Phone calls became more curt, ending quickly. Her father would get on the line, and she could picture him shaking his head at her. “She’s fine,” he’d say. “You know your mother.” Did she? Disagreements with your mother happened when you were a teenager, not when you were thirty-five years old. Sharon was doing what Sharon was doing. She had finished school at last, and she was working hard at a job not everyone could be good at (or had the stomach for; her job was not easy). And all her mother could worry about was when she was going to have a baby. Who even knew if she was able to have a baby? It was ridiculous: she knew how the body worked, but sometimes she wondered if her abortion had broken her somehow. She’d been plenty careless after that in her life, so why didn’t she ever get pregnant again? Because it wasn’t meant to be. She was better on her own; she knew it. I’m sorry I can’t be what you want me to be, she thought as her mother handed the phone to her father.