by Pearl Cleage
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
Everything 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!”
FOURTEEN
Zora’s office was part of a dingy little suite of storefronts a few blocks from West End. When we pulled up at the curb, there were already several people inside. One young woman on the phone and two young men waiting patiently in folding chairs that had seen better days. I wondered why so many organizations committed to doing good are equally committed to looking so bad while they do it.
Boasting pricey, renovated lofts on one side of the street, a homeless shelter and a U-Haul on the other, the area reflected an uneasy mixture of earnest gentrification and implacable despair. Looking in the front window past the sign that said: VETSERVE—WHERE YOUR NEEDS ALWAYS COME FIRST, I made her promise to call me if she couldn’t get a ride home and assured her that I could find my way without any help from Mapquest.
The new management company had their offices on the third floor in one of those prefab buildings that come complete with a few pitiful little trees and no style whatsoever. Southwest Atlanta was full of them. Even the artwork in the entrance lobby was generic. Bad generic. I got on the elevator with a weary-looking young mother and a small boy whose hand she was holding tightly, as if he might bolt at any second. She pushed the button for two, which seemed to be a floor inhabited strictly by doctors.
The doors closed with a soft hiss and the kid looked at me with large, unblinking eyes. When I smiled, he whispered miserably, “I have to get a shot.”
His mother glared down at him, but he didn’t look at her.
“It won’t be so bad,” I lied.
“Yes, it will,” he said, still whispering. “I had one before.”
“Hush, boy,” his mother said as the doors opened for them and she pulled him out to face the terror of the doctor’s needle. “She don’t care nothin’ about all that.”
“It’s okay,” I said, to him as much as to her, wishing I could spare him the routine horrors of childhood, knowing I couldn’t. Everybody’s got to kill their own snakes.
The management company was the first glass door on the right. Small black letters identified the offices of G. Woodruff and Associates. The smiling receptionist included the name as part of her greeting in case you missed it.
“Welcome to G. Woodruff and Associates,” she said. “How can I help you?”
“I’m Josephine Evans,” I said. “I’m here to pick up a key.”
The young woman had a lovely face, a stylish haircut, and a dark blue dress that was office appropriate but still managed to be sexy. This was a perfect job for her and her twinkle indicated that she enjoyed it, too, but now she just looked confused.
“A key?”
“You manage a property I own at 1839 Martin Luther King. I want to take a look at it.”
“Take a look at it?”
Her echo was becoming annoying. She wasn’t pretty enough to be this incompetent. Nobody was. Where was the person I spoke to on the telephone yesterday to tell them I was coming? Why hadn’t I written down her name?
“I spoke to someone about this yesterday,” I said. “She told me I could come in this morning and pick it up.”
“Do you remember who it was that told you that?”
I wanted to say, If I remembered her name, would I have said “someone”? but I restrained myself.
“I believe she was Ms. Woodruff’s secretary,” I said, figuring I’d take a shot. If she wasn’t the one, she could find the one. The
receptionist’s expression conveyed more doubt than relief, but at least she didn’t say Ms. Woodruff’s secretary?
“Have a seat, please,” she said, reaching for the phone. “I’ll see if I can locate her.”
She said it like behind the closed door to the Woodruff and Associate’s inner sanctum, there was a labyrinthine maze so intricate that one could get lost for hours, completely unable to contact the front desk. I sat down on the small gray couch and looked at the magazines and newspapers neatly arranged on the glass coffee table: Fortune, Atlanta magazine, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Atlanta Business Chronicle. There were also copies of the company brochure. Ms. Woodruff had sent me a form letter and a copy of that brochure when the former managers closed up shop. There was a picture of the company’s owner and her team of what the copy called “real estate professionals.” I remember being pleased that I was now in the hands of an experienced black woman who had assembled an impressive-looking multiracial team.
The artwork on the walls featured panoramic views of the Atlanta skyline at various times of the day. Some were the traditional nighttime view with red ribbons of light flashing by in a blur on the freeways. Some were the same angle in bright sunshine, downtown now superimposed against a cloudless, impossibly blue sky. But there were several others in black and white that were geared more toward art than advertising. In these, downtown Atlanta achieved a kind of mysterious grandeur almost in spite of itself. They made me think of those magical photographs of New York City that Alfred Stieglitz took before he met Georgia O’Keeffe and started doing those scandalous nudes. The room was pleasant enough, but it struck me as a little cold. Even the bouquet of calla lilies was too perfectly calculated to bring much spontaneous pleasure.
“Ms. Booker will be right out,” the receptionist said, relieved to have located the person who could answer the question I had posed. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“No, thanks,” I said, nodding at the pictures I’d been admiring. “Who’s the photographer?”
