Linden Hills

by Gloria Naylor

  She stopped suddenly when she saw the two boys. “Why, William, how nice.” She gave him a smile composed of several jerky motions with her closed mouth. “I haven’t seen you in ages. It was sweet of you to drop by today.”

  “Evening, Mrs. Tilson.” Willie always felt big and awkward and black around this delicate, yellow woman.

  “He didn’t drop by today—he’s spending the night.” Lester took their coats and hung them up. “What’s for dinner, Mom?”

  Mrs. Tilson followed his movements intently with her tiny, darting eyes. “Well, I guess we can always find more, and especially for such a good friend of Lester’s.”

  “Look, I know you didn’t plan on me being here.” Willie had difficulty finding something to do with his hands. “It’s sort of short notice and I’m not very hungry anyway. I—”

  “Non-sense.” Mrs. Tilson patted his hand lightly and rapidly. “There’s always something for company. But we’re eating like peasants tonight—just fried chicken. But I’m trying something a bit daring with the potatoes. A cheese and wine sauce I saw in the papers.”

  “I love fried chicken,” Willie volunteered eagerly.

  “Like I said—common food, but filling. Come in and sit down, and tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself, William.”

  “Don’t you have to watch your sauce or something?” Lester took Willie’s arm. “I thought we’d go to my room and play some tapes till dinner.”

  Mrs. Tilson took Willie’s other arm, and he was amazed at the powerful grip of her thin fingers as she firmly guided him into the living room. “Lester has always been so selfish, William. Now he knows I want to have a few minutes to catch up on your life and he’s trying to herd you off to himself.”

  She patted a cushion on the sofa and Willie sat down gingerly on the edge and put his hands over his closed knees. Lester followed them and bounced down on a chair in the corner, sprawling his feet out.

  “Lester, must you abuse the furniture that way?” She turned her head to Willie quickly. “Upholstering is so dear these days and he’s going to ruin my springs. I just had the set redone this year; what do you think, William?”

  “It’s really lovely, ma’am.” Willie gave an obligatory survey of the room.

  “Mom, his name is Willie, not William. A thousand times I’ve told you, it’s Willie.”

  “Willie is a derivative of William, Lester. Surely his birth certificate doesn’t have Willie on it, and I like calling people by their proper names.”

  “Yes, it does, ma’am. My mother named me Willie K. Mason.”

  “Oh.” She darted her eyes over his body. “And what does the K stand for?”

  “Nothing, just a K. I guess she liked the sound of it.”

  “How … different.” She gave him another serialized smile.

  “It’s not different at all,” Lester said. “Southern people often give their kids initials for names—and your mom’s from Alabama, right, Willie?—you know, like TJ or LC.”

  “I know that, Lester, but I always thought those initials stood for something. It just never occurred to me that people lacked such imagination they had to resort to giving a child a letter for a name.”

  Willie cringed and Lester narrowed his eyes. “Well, I guess there are two ways of looking at that, Mom. Some people wonder why someone would be stupid enough to give a child three multisyllable names that he never learns to spell and is going to drop as soon as he’s old enough to realize that nobody gives a damn about any of it anyway.” He turned to Willie innocently. “Did you know my full name is Lesterfield Walcott Montgomery Tilson, Willie? Or is it Lester Fieldwalcott Montgomery Tilson, Mom? They had to type those letters so close together on my birth certificate it’s hard to make them out now.”

  Mrs. Tilson’s mouth tightened. “I gave you a name that I thought would fit the heights I hoped you’d climb. It was a great name for what I dreamed would be a great man. Needless to say—”

  Lester cut her off. “Mom, even the president of the United States doesn’t have a desk large enough for a nameplate like Lesterfield Walcott Montgomery Tilson. I’d have to become a pimp to afford a desk that big.”

  Willie couldn’t hold on any longer and started coughing and patting his chest. Mrs. Tilson looked at him sharply. “Is there something wrong, Willie?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Tilson.” He coughed again. “I seem to have a catch in my throat.”

  She turned to Lester coldly. “Get him a glass of water. And don’t forget to bring a coaster.” She watched Lester leave the room, then put her hands lightly on Willie’s arm. “I don’t know why he likes to plague me—do you, Willie?” Willie knew he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. But fortunately she had no intentions of waiting for his reply. “If you listen to him, you’d think it was a crime for me to want a better life for my children than I had.” She gave a long sigh and looked down at her hands. “Life wasn’t easy with Mr. Tilson. I never went to college because I got married early and started having children. And then I felt it was my place to be at home and help them to become decent human beings. I only wanted them to have things—to be able to make it in the world alone. You know how hard it is for black people, Willie, and especially black men—everyone wants to hold them down. I didn’t want that to happen to my son. Is that so wrong?”

  Willie had to agree that there was really nothing wrong with that. He planned to shake his head sympathetically at Mrs. Tilson, but she had already gone on, her light voice pecking at his ears.

  “I had to live in this house almost on the charity of other people. My husband’s mother never liked me, and all because I wanted to make something of this place. I was never one for keeping up with the Joneses, but it’s pretty embarrassing to have the worst house on the block and to just settle for that.”

  Willie started to say that he thought she had a lovely home, but before he could clear his throat she had forged ahead.

  “Do you think I like being laughed at by my neighbors because my husband never wanted anything nice? Everything you see here I had to scrape and quarrel and beg for, and it’s not that much. There are homes across Wayne Avenue that are better than this one, and we live in Linden Hills.” She gave another long sigh.

  Lester called from the kitchen, “I can’t find no coasters among all this mess! I’m bringing the water without one.”

  “Did you hear that English? ‘I can’t find no coasters.’ And he knows better, Willie. He just does that to plague me. He’s decided to be nothing and do nothing with his life, and he never lets a day go by without reminding me of it in some way.”

  Willie mumbled something about Lester being a poet.

  “Yes. His poetry.” Mrs. Tilson sighed and looked down at her hands again. “Some of the finest men of our race were poets, but does Lester ever get any of his published? You can’t live off little bits of looseleaf that you hide under your mattress. And what’s to happen twenty, thirty years from now when I’m dead and gone? Can he ever hope to support a family from reading in coffeehouses? I know what will happen. He’ll let my home run down and then sell it for anything to just about anybody. My grandchildren will be ragged and homeless. You have a mother, Willie. Does she want that for you? Is that the way you get this black pride that Lester’s always writing about?”

  Lester came back into the room and set Willie’s water glass down on a folded paper towel. Mrs. Tilson looked at the paper towel with disgust and shook her head. And Willie almost found himself doing the same thing. She wasn’t such a bad woman—a little prissy, but hell, every mother wanted her kids to do something with their lives if she was any kind of mother at all.

  “Willie and I have been having a nice, long chat.”

  “I’ll bet.” Lester slouched back into the chair. “Did she get to the part yet about her naked grandchildren begging in the subways?”

  Mrs. Tilson nodded at Willie as if to say, See what I was talking about? and then she got up. “I’m going to set the tab
le. We’ll eat as soon as Roxanne gets in.” She patted Willie on the shoulder and gave a final sigh before leaving the room.

  “Why don’t you lay light on her, Les? She means well.”

  “Sure she does, White. She meant well when she killed my father, too. That’s one well-meaning woman. It took a crowbar to pry her out of his casket after she had him working two jobs with a heart condition. Two fucking jobs, and for what? Because so-and-so had a finished basement, and so-and-so sent their daughter to Brandeis. And didn’t he want his kids to have something? What in the hell was that something she kept talking about? So it was always, ‘Lester, your father’s too tired to play catch with you,’ or ‘Don’t wake him up with your nonsense, remember his heart.’ But she’d wake him up in time to catch the bus for that midnight job. And when he refused to do it anymore, he was a failure, a bum. Every time she tells me I’m going to be like my father, I think about him sleeping four hours a day for ten years and want to choke her. She’s wrong, I’ll never be like my old man. No woman’s gonna hound me into the grave so she can weep over it in imported handkerchiefs.”

  Lester’s tense jaw muscles had deep red lines along them, so Willie knew it wasn’t wise to disagree with him at the moment. For the second time since he’d come into that house he was at a loss for words, and the slamming of the front door mercifully broke the silence in the room.

  Roxanne Tilson called out from the front hall, “Mom, I’m home,” and put her brown suede coat away. She insisted on wearing calf-length knit dresses that didn’t quite complement her full curves. Her body gave the impression that it was just one good meal away from being labeled fat. And Roxanne was constantly on guard never to have that meal. So her life consisted of nibbles: bits of lettuce and cucumber, dabs of fish and cottage cheese. She never lost weight because periodic depressions would send her nibbling potato chips, French chocolates, and Hostess Twinkies—only to start the cycle over again. She had her mother’s canary coloring, but Roxanne groomed her life and body with a hawklike determination to marry black, marry well—or not at all. And at twenty-seven, with a decade’s worth of bleaching creams and hair relaxers, coupled with a Wellesley B.A. and a job in an ad agency, she was still waiting. She remained at home because a Linden Hills address was far better than any she could afford on her own salary, and as the girls at the office said, you don’t get a Park Avenue husband with a Harlem zip code.

  Roxanne felt comfortable with the fact that she had paid her dues to the Civil Rights Movement by wearing an Afro for six months and enrolling in black history courses in college. These courses supplied her with the statistical proof that black men were further behind white men than ever before, and that the gap would keep widening. It was only a minority of that minority who were ever going somewhere and she was determined that one of them take her along on that ride. She knew the competition was stiff. Besides a multitude of other sisters like herself, she had to outrun an ego, a career, and desperate white women to snatch the heart of such a prize. But she was confident that a formula for success lay somewhere in a cross between her two heroines—Eleanor Roosevelt and Diana Ross—and she was constantly juggling the mixture. Looking at her brother only reminded her of the statistics she was up against; if he turned out that way with his background, what hope was there for other black men and the 100 to 88 ratio of black women who had to pick among them?

  Roxanne sailed past the living room and turned her head. “I see Lester is into his favorite activity. And Willie? Haven’t seen you in ages—I thought you were in jail.” She laughed and kept on going.

  “We love you, too,” Lester called behind her and stuck up his middle finger. He gave a long sigh. “Well, blood, now that the zoo’s assembled, let’s go eat.”

  Mrs. Tilson had set the dining room table with china, silverware, and linen napkins in honor of Willie, whom she said she’d always loved, and she emphasized her devotion by sitting beside him and patting his hand. Willie wished she hadn’t gone to so much trouble, because the starched linen kept slipping off his lap, and he spent the evening cringing every time his heavy knife hit the thin plate or his teeth clinked against the fragile Norwegian crystal. Lester didn’t have those problems because he picked up his chicken with his hands and tore off huge chunks with his teeth. Any juice that dripped on his fingers was wiped off with a slice of bread before he stuffed it into his mouth. Between the two bites of chicken and teaspoon of potatoes that Roxanne consumed during the entire meal, she dominated the conversation with the importance of her new promotion, the various slights she endured at the office, and at least five references to the fact that she had a date that night. She was mentioning Xavier for the sixth time when Lester threw down the thigh bone he was sucking. “If I hear that fruit’s name one more time, I’m throwing up this half-done chicken all over the table!”

  Roxanne glanced calmly over her shoulder. “That would surprise no one. You’ve been sitting there eating like a pig all evening. You might as well finish the meal in character.”

  “Well, some of us in this family eat like pigs and some of us look like pigs, so I guess it all evens up,” Lester said and braced himself for a fight.

  Roxanne flushed deeply and addressed her mother. “Do I have to take this? After working all day, am I to be subjected to this type of abuse by someone who didn’t even pay for the toothpicks on this table?”

  “Lester, Roxanne, please, not in front of company.” Mrs. Tilson gave Willie a nervous smile, showing her small teeth.

  “Company?” Roxanne’s empty fork clattered against her plate. “We don’t have any company tonight. All we have is a carbon copy of the nothing that Lester’s determined to make of his life.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Willie said. “I didn’t beg to come here, you know. My luck’s not so hard I gotta listen to this for a few potatoes and a—”

  “You’ve gotta lot of damn nerve insulting my friend,” Lester cut him off. “And who have you ever brought here? That fag with the pink silk ties won’t even set a foot in this door. He sits Out there and blows his horn like he’s picking up someone from a whorehouse. Now, you wanna talk about nothing—that’s nothing, baby.”

  “You wouldn’t know a real man if he was jammed down your throat.” Roxanne swung around to face Lester. “Xavier is the vice president of minority marketing at General Motors. And what have you ever done except scrape a plate clean?”

  “Don’t you worry about it, I’ve done plenty. I’m working for immortality, but that’s something you’ll never understand.”

  “Im-mor-tal-ity!” Roxanne’s voice was steadily climbing, leaving her Wellesley accent behind. “That crap you write? That’s an excuse for freeloading and not getting a real job. I’ve read your junk. ‘Up with the nation, down with whitey.’ How you gonna get rid of ’em, Lester? Like you did that chicken—chew ’em to death?”

  “E-nough!” Mrs. Tilson banged her fork on the tabletop.

  “You’re right about that.” Lester got up from his chair. “Come on, Willie.”

  “No, wait.” Mrs. Tilson grabbed Willie’s arm. “Now Willie’s going to think we’re a group of barbarians in this house. Roxanne, I want you to apologize.”

  “Why? I meant every word I said.”

  “No—to Willie. What you and Lester think about each other is one thing, but Willie is our guest. And only the crudest of people are rude to their dinner guests.”

  Willie felt a flood of regret for every bad thought he’d ever had about Mrs. Tilson.

  “All right, I’m sorry,” Roxanne mumbled. “When I’m angry I talk too quickly. My remarks were uncalled for—to you.” She looked straight at Willie.

  “Aw, forget it,” Willie said. “And thank you, Mrs. Tilson. The meal was excellent.”

  “Not at all, Willie. You’re welcome here anytime.”

  Willie followed Lester up the stairs, thinking it was a pity he had disrupted his mother’s dinner like that. She had been trying so hard to have things nice. He glanced
back over his shoulder to take a final look at the table setting and saw Mrs. Tilson mouthing something behind her hand to Roxanne.

  Lester’s bedroom window faced the front of the house so it overlooked Linden Hills. Its southern exposure provided the perfect light for growing plants, but he refused to have anything green in his room. A four-foot poster of Malcolm X was taped over a dresser littered with old newspapers, Classic Comic books, and half a set of the Arno Press black history series. A pair of brown silk briefs hung over the portable television screen and under the television stand was his stereo and tape deck. Three-foot stacks of Malcolm X’s taped speeches and Aretha Franklin and Earth Wind & Fire albums and cassettes were piled at the foot of the stand. Willie was lying on the king-sized bed with his legs crossed up in the air while Lester dug through his tapes.

  “You’ve gotta hear this one, White—‘Message to the Grass Roots’—where Malcolm talks about those Toms who sold out the March on Washington in ’sixty-three.”

  A horn blew outside. “There goes the prick.” Lester sighed.

  Roxanne stuck her head inside his door. “Excuse me, Lester, do you have the twenty dollars I loaned you last week?”

  “Why? Is it your turn to pay for the hotel?”

  “Look, I don’t have all evening. If you have my money, would you please give it to me?”

  “I’ve only got ten.” Lester kept sorting through his tapes.

  “That’ll be fine—I never like going anywhere without my own money.” Roxanne was practicing her Eleanor Roosevelt profile and spoke very patiently. She watched him for a few more seconds. “And I’m in a hurry!”

  Lester got up and gave her the money. “Can’t Mr. General Motors come off a few bucks for you? I thought your first commandment was never give it up for free?”

  Roxanne put the money in her bag. “Thank you, very much,” she enunciated slowly. The horn blew again. “And if you’re looking for your Malcolm X tape, it’s in my room.” She closed the door and ran down the stairs.