The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

The half-cracked bedroom door opened wider, and Lena, Chuck’s wife, poked her head in. She was a little woman, short and very thin, bony, with tiny wrists and ankles, and no hips or breasts to speak of. George thought of her as barely a wisp of a person, not particularly womanly in any way, not particularly anything really. When he had first met her, right before service the first Sunday they’d attended Blessed Chapel, when Maddy had introduced George and Regina to the couple, George had almost not even realized she was standing there beside her husband. When Maddy had said, “This is Deacon Ellis’ wife, Lena,” George had almost not understood who she was talking about, until Chuck had put his arm around Lena’s shoulders and she came into focus, came into being almost.

  "Pastor Goode and Linda is downstairs," Lena said. "They brought us a meatloaf. Come on down and say hello."

  “We’ll be down in just a minute, honey,” Chuck said.

  Lena lingered a moment, George thought, before going back downstairs.

  Chuck turned back to George. “We wasn’t close, me and my father. Now that he’s gone, I feel like I missed out. Like I should have tried harder. You know what I mean?”

  George nodded, but didn’t say anything. He felt for Chuck and wanted to be of some comfort to him, but he hated thinking about his own father, and all the ways he had not been the right kind of son. He wished he had the sweet potatoes to give to Chuck. He wished he had a way to say the things he wanted to say.

  “I’m an orphan,” Chuck said, and laughed. “I’m past thirty years old and I still think of it that way. An orphan. At least you still got your mama. Cherish that, George. It means something to have somebody in the world who you came from.”

  “I guess,” George said. “But living up to her expectations is just as hard as living up to his was.”

  Chuck nodded. “They always the people we want to understand us the most. But we always think they can’t.”

  “I know she can’t,” George said.

  “Well,” was all Chuck said to that.

  George sighed. “I’m a good son. I got a good job, a wife, smart, good-looking kids. I go to church. I do everything I’m supposed to do.”

  “You think your mother don’t know that? Or maybe it’s yourself you trying to convince.”

  “What you mean?” George asked.

  “I don’t know,” Chuck said. “Just sometimes I don’t think you like yourself much, friend.”

  When they got up to go back downstairs, George asked Chuck, “You think there’s anybody that can really understand us?”

  “The Lord can.”

  George smiled, and nodded, but he didn’t really believe that the Lord could understand him any better than his mother.

  ***

  The block party started at nine in the morning, and lasted until after dark. Although it was meant to be a party for the block, and not for the church, almost everyone in attendance was a member of the church’s congregation, because almost every family who lived on the block attended Blessed Chapel. The one and only exception were the Caseys, who lived five houses up from the Delaneys, in a house they rented. Ruth Casey was Dexter Liddy’s half-sister, and she lived in the house with her three sons. Doris had very little good to say about her sister-in-law. So little, in fact, that what good she did have to say could easily have been mistaken for none.

  “She always need something from us,” Doris told Regina, Maddy, and Grace Kellogg, who lived on the next block but came over for the party, as they all sat in the shade of Regina’s porch, drinking iced tea. “If she don’t need to borrow money we aint got, then she need Dexter to spend time with her children that he don’t have.”

  “It’s hard raising boys without a father,” Maddy said. “I’m always worrying that mine aint gone turn out right.”

  “Compared to them three,” Doris said, nodding towards Ruth’s sons, who were roughhousing in the street, “all y’all children is angels. Them boys is hoodlums in the making. Aint got a lick of good sense between them.”

  “They just kids, Doris,” Grace said.

  “The smallest one aint no older than Sarah,” said Regina.

  “I know it,” Doris said. “And he the worst one. Lamar. I got to hide my purse every time he come in my house. But what you expect, when she don’t even take them boys to church? Aint no child ever turn out right that didn’t know the Lord.”

  Regina, Maddy and Grace all nodded in agreement.

  “Just listen to that music she got playing,” Doris said.

  Almost all the music that was playing along the street, wafting out from record players set near the open doors and windows of many of the houses, was gospel. But from the Casey’s open window, Louis Jordan’s Aint That Just Like a Woman blasted out into the street, and most of the teenagers and children on the block stood near the Casey’s steps, dancing along to it. Doris’ seven year-old daughter, Sondra, was among them.

  “Sondra!” Doris yelled. “Get your little behind over here right now!”

  There was nothing little about Sondra’s behind. She was the biggest seven-year-old Maddy had ever seen, built like a solid wall, wide and dense. But Maddy refrained from correcting Doris. “Ooh, I love that song!” she said instead, snapping her fingers.

  “Me, too,” said Regina, tapping her feet.

  Grace laughed.

  Doris rolled her eyes at all of them and got up and left the porch. They watched her hurry over to her husband, inserting herself into his conversation with his sister.

  “Who y’all voting for?” Maddy asked, when Doris was out of earshot. She was talking about the vote for block captains, which was taking place that day. The Pastor and his wife, who had been block captains for the last five years, were stepping down because running both the block and the church was getting to be too much.

  “Well, I don’t live on the block, so I aint voting for nobody,” Grace said, “but Pastor want y’all to vote for Doris and Dex.”

  “Well, that makes sense,” said Regina. “Doris and Dexter do a lot for this block, and for the church. Who else is running?”

  “Nobody,” Maddy said, waving a dismissive hand. “It aint never been a thing you run for. We just decide who we like and vote for ‘em. You can vote for anybody. Even me.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Regina said, laughing. “This block would go to hell in a hand-basket in a week.”

  Maddy leaned over and smacked her on the arm.

  As the day wore on, people cast their ballots, pushing folded pieces of paper into a slot that was cut into the top of a shoe box that sat on a table full of condiments, next to the mustard. Maddy had almost forgotten to vote, and only remembered when she went to get pickles for her third hamburger, around three in the afternoon. She was about to write “Doris and Dex” when Ava ran over and stuck her hand in a large bowl of potato chips, then turned and ran off again. Maddy laughed and was filled with the same warmth she always felt when Ava was near her. She turned back to the ballot and, without thinking, started to write “Ava” but just before the pencil scratched against the paper she realized that was silly, as Ava wasn’t but six years old. Instead, she wrote “Regina and George,” and when she folded the paper and stuck it in the top of the cardboard box, the warm feeling was still with her.

  Near sundown, somebody thought to count the votes. Everyone gathered around and Linda Goode made the announcement.

  “We got ourselves what they call an upset,” she said. “Forty-six for Doris and Dexter Liddy; and fifty-one for George and Regina Delaney.”

  There was murmuring in the crowd. Doris’s smile was like something painted on, rigid and emotionless. Pastor Goode looked like he didn’t understand what had just happened. Regina couldn’t believe it. She had never even thought about being block captain, and she was sure George hadn’t, either.

  For a moment, it seemed that nobody knew what to say. Although more people had voted for George and Regina than for anybody else, it was as if each person who did had expected to be the only one. After all, the
Liddys were the Pastor’s choice: he had all but appointed them the new captains. The Delaneys had been on the block less than three years.

  Then, suddenly, Dexter Liddy shouted, “See what happens when Negroes get the vote? You never know who we gone put in office!”

  The crowd erupted in laughter.

  All except Pastor Goode, who, Regina thought, looked a little less than amused.

  1976

  Ava got to work at ten. The museum’s cafeteria, which opened at eleven on Sundays, and closed at four-thirty, was empty except for the three cooks. Ava was responsible for buffet set-up on weekends. The cooks, who got there at eight, had already made the afternoon’s food by the time she got there, but the buffet, with its shiny aluminum and plastic sneeze-guard, was still empty. Ava went to the back corner of the kitchen and grabbed a small white bucket. She filled it with hot water and dropped in a disinfecting tablet, which turned the water blue and fizzy. She got a clean dishcloth and plunged it into the water, and then wiped down the buffet. She then poured the dirty water into the large drain in the floor of the kitchen. The aluminum bins, out of which the food was served, were stacked along one wall, and she began grabbing them and placing them in the empty slots of the buffet. When there was a bin in every slot, she went back into the kitchen, where the cooks had placed the day’s food in large containers that they had left on the tabletops. “Got ‘em all ready for you, Ava,” Silvio, one of the cooks, a skinny Italian boy with acne, said when he saw her. Ava grabbed one container of meatloaf and one of corn and carried both to the buffet, where she dumped their contents into separate bins, then returned to the kitchen for the chicken wings and the mashed potatoes. It took a few trips, but in a short while she had got all the bins full of food. She carried the empty containers back to the sinks and set them aside for the dishwashers. Next, she got the plates of desserts, the cakes and pies and brownies, all of which had been pre-sliced by the cooks, and set them on top of the buffet. Lastly, she grabbed a stack of “Sunday” menus, and placed them by the plates and utensils at the start of the buffet.

  As soon as the cafeteria opened at eleven, customers started trickling in and Ava served them. The whole time, through every spoonful of cauliflower and plastic-gloved handful of tater tots, she thought about the drawing. Whenever she had a free moment, she took it out of her back pocket, unfolded the yellow page and stared at it, its angles and shadows, the way it seemed to breathe on its own, as if she had not just drawn it, but had birthed it, a miracle on the page, a thing she could almost not believe she had actually done, and absently, thoughtlessly, at that, a doodle on a grocery list. Where had it come from, this easy talent?

  “You don’t have macaroni and cheese today?” It was Richard from the ticketing desk, on his lunch break.

  Ava shook her head, no. She folded the drawing, stuck it back into her pocket, and scooped him up some cream corn.

  When her shift was over, she decided to walk through the museum and out the front instead of out the back like she usually did, even though

  cafeteria workers weren’t supposed to. She walked through the cafeteria, down a corridor, out into the Great Stair Hall. She had worked at the museum since she was seventeen, but she had rarely ventured out of the cafeteria, because the paintings and sculptures in the rooms that surrounded her had never seemed especially interesting. She had gotten a job there only because a job had been available, or, at least that’s what she had thought.

  In the Great Stair Hall, she was met by the late day light coming in through the large, high windows and skylights, casting itself onto the Greek-temple-like, ceramic-glazed columns. As she descended the wide marble staircase, there were, on either side of her, huge, high-ceilinged exhibition rooms, and as she passed by them on her way down, she glanced inside, catching only glimpses of the art within them, seeing only colors and angles. When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she turned and went through a large archway that opened into the museum’s American collection. At this time of the day, near closing, there were only a few people roaming the galleries.

  Ava stood in front of a wall of drawings and her attention was pulled to one in particular, a charcoal drawing made around 1940, of a man at a grinding wheel, his large hands holding some instrument to the wheel, his body slightly bent at the waist so that he leaned into the work. His face was created in curves and shadows, with a broad nose and thick lips, and the set of his brow, deeply troubled in charcoal, along with his slightly rounded shoulders, suggested the weight of the world around him, which was hidden in charcoal shadow.

  Ava moved from that room into the next, taking in images of farmers in cornfields and urban skylines, and drops of heavy color splattered on enormous canvases. Turning a corner into a green-walled room, she came upon a painting titled “In the Boudoir: (Before the Mirror)” showing a dark-haired woman standing before a looking glass, seeing herself reflected in odd shapes and contours, and mismatched colors, so that the woman in the mirror—faceless, without eyes or mouth—looked little like the woman standing before it, whose skin was made in gold, and whose cheeks were blushed. The only thing that was the same about both the woman and her reflection was the way their arms raised high over their heads. Ava sat staring at the painting for a long while, her head tilted slightly to one side, her eyes moving along the angles, the strange curves of the woman’s neck, back, buttocks, and thigh. The color seemed to enter Ava, the red filling her view like blood or sunset, the blues racing through her, cooling her skin in the already-air-conditioned room. She thought again about who she had been, before, and wondered when the woman in the mirror had become different. The obvious answer was that it had happened after her brother died, though Ava did not now remember anything that had felt like a change within her. The days and months that had followed Geo’s death seemed now like a blur of wailing and screaming—and not her own, but Regina’s—and the hazy memory of a dull aching inside herself. She could not remember crying, could not recall, even as she sat there trying, the sting of the loss, the overwhelming grief that she knew she must have felt. Or had she? If his death had numbed her, changed her so completely, maybe it had happened quickly, in a moment, and she had never had the chance to feel much of anything at all. She wished she could remember.

  Staring up at the gold-skinned woman before the mirror, Ava willed herself to recall the day Geo died. She knew it had been hot, the thick of summertime, a muggy August morning, a Saturday. She had been thirteen, with barely-combed hair and eyes flashing fire, standing in the church parking lot at Regina’s side, staring down at the boys lying on the scorching asphalt. She felt a kind of shock, a confused disbelief, flooding through her young self, but not the heartache and grief that should have followed. She remembered now that it had surprised her even then. Standing there she had wondered why it did not rip through her, why she did not fall to her knees as her mother did, why she did not clutch her chest and tear her hair, why she did not die herself when she saw him there. Instead, she had stood aside as Regina lifted Geo from the ground, with a physical strength that made a liar of her small stature, and carried him up the street home. Regina had laid Geo on the sofa, and wept beside him, on her knees, while Sarah shook and cried beside her, and George stood in the kitchen doorway, watching in silence. Ava had knelt next to her brother and looked into his eyes, which were still open, but all she had seen there, in the deep brown, was her own reflection.

  Ava opened her eyes and the colors of the woman before the mirror seemed lusher, deeper than just moments ago, as if some filter had been removed and she could see it purely now. The reds and blues, greens and golds, that had already filled her up now overflowed and, just for a moment, she felt she was drowning in color.

  She got off the bus a few stops before home and pulled out the yellow sheet of paper once again, this time to examine the grocery list. Inside the store, she grabbed a wire basket, and was in the produce aisle, squeezing tomatoes, when she heard a familiar voice call her name, and looked up to se
e Sarah walking towards her.

  “What are you doing in here?” Ava asked. “It’s my turn to do the shopping, I have the list.”

  “We came to get some crab legs,” Sarah said. “Helena’s gone cook them up for dinner.”

  “Is she here with you?”

  Sarah nodded. “In the seafood section.” She looked happy, grinning widely. “We spent the whole day talking. She’s so interesting, Ava, so independent. She told me about all the places she’s been to, all the different kinds of people she’s met. We had a real good time.”

  “That’s good,” Ava said.

  “Mama wants okra to go with the crab legs,” Sarah said. “Help me pick some out; she don’t never like the ones I get.”

  When Sarah said mama, Ava was almost sure she sounded annoyed, though detecting the nuances in the tones of people’s voices wasn’t something she was good at. She was usually completely unaware of her sister’s irritation or upset until Sarah came out and said she wasn’t happy about something.

  She helped her sister pick out the okra, checking for color and firmness.

  “Sarah?”

  “Hm?”

  “Do you remember what I was like when I was young? When we were children? Before Geo died?”

  A shadow passed over her sister’s face. “Of course I remember.”

  “Tell me what I was like.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t remember.”

  “What you mean, you don’t remember?”

  “I don’t remember being different than I am now,” Ava said. “But I was. Wasn’t I?”

  Sarah folded her arms across her chest. “What you trying to do?”

  “I’m not trying to do anything,” Ava said. “I’m asking you a question.”

  “You can’t stand it, can you? You can’t stand it that somebody’s paying attention to me.”

  Ava just looked at her sister. She had no idea what Sarah was talking about.