Andrea can still irritate me too. But now it’s just normal sibling tensions, not painful, deep-seated, or hateful. I didn’t know quite where my interview with her would take me, but I do know this: Whether the script had become a movie or not, it definitely brought my sister and me back together. Now she helps decorate my apartment. I have Thanksgiving with her, Les, and Jade. I go to picnics with them. I support her. She supports me. After all these troubled years, I have a sister again.
FAMILY REUNION
It was a warm June evening out in the suburbs of Newport News, Virginia, a once sleepy southern town that in the twenty-first century had boomed with mixed residential development, big-box department stores, and high-tech businesses such as Symantec. I sat outside an Olive Garden in the middle of a sprawling strip mall, holding a small red beeper that would light up when our table was ready. My mother sat across the walkway from me on a green iron bench alongside the reason we were all here: my eighteen-year-old niece, Leigh, who was graduating from high school the next day. Her father wasn’t there, but we tried to ignore that fact. Helping in that process was the man sitting next to me, Van, father of my oldest niece, Ebony, who, in the strange alchemy of father-daughter relationships, was actually closer to Leigh than he was to his own daughter. Ebony was in our little circle too, standing a bit to the side, seeming anxious for this dinner to be over. Andrea sat on another metal bench with Jade, who clung lovingly to her mother.
My father came up the walkway alongside his brother James George. They were a pair of short, compact, tough, light-skinned southern boys who had taken very divergent paths since leaving Newport News for good in the late fifties. After serving in the Korean War my father married my mother and moved to New York City. Uncle James had stayed in the service, traveling around the world and moving patiently up the ranks.
By the eighties he was a lieutenant colonel working out of the Pentagon, and in charge of administering the Army’s gigantic PX system. After leaving the service he’d started a successful computer business in the D.C.-Maryland area. All through that time he’d been married to the same woman, and had a boy and a girl. He looked fit and prosperous, despite bypass surgery a few years earlier.
Nelson Elmer, the older of the George boys by two years, never had a career, though he’d traveled widely during his peripatetic life. I could probably count the times we’d hung out during my life using my fingers and toes. In fact, as he walked toward me I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a real conversation.
Both my father and uncle wore stylish light-colored summer suits. My uncle had more hair, while my father’s balding pate was shaped like my balding pate. I hugged my uncle. I shook hands with my father. Then I noticed that he was missing a lot of teeth. It was hard to believe that a man who’d been careful, almost vain, about his appearance would allow five or six of his front teeth to fall out and not be replaced. He’d been working as a security guard over the last decade. Putting it all together it meant that Nelson Elmer probably had little or no health coverage. Ergo, he had no way to fix his teeth. I tried not to focus on his mouth, which is hard when a man missing a bunch of teeth is talking to you. The nasty irony of this moment was that we were all there to celebrate the fact that Leigh planned to study dentistry in college. All weekend family members would make jokes about getting cheap dental care, or even investing in her sure-to-be-lucrative practice. Yet her grandfather walked around with a sad mouth that everyone noticed and no one had the heart to ask about. Whatever discomfort I had being around him was dissipated every time he spoke—which was often. Still, Elmer wasn’t a bit self-conscious.
At a long table I found myself sitting between my mother and father, a position I couldn’t recall ever being in before. The last time I was even present when my parents were in the same space was in the 812 New Jersey backyard in the eighties. Ebony was about four and Leigh was yet to be born. I took a picture of my mother and father sitting on a bench that day, which had been my only photographic evidence that the two had ever known each other. But now I’d have another. My sister had her camera. My uncle had his. In between the salads and the ribs and the large Coca-Colas, we got lots of pictures. Many smiles. Some genuine.
The next day Nelson Elmer drove my mother and me through Newport News and over to Hampton, to Leigh’s graduation. Perhaps when I was two or three I’d ridden in a car with them, and maybe once or twice as an older child. What is a commonplace occurrence for most of the world was a revelation for me. In the short journey on Highway 64 through Newport News to Hampton, two small cities my mother and father had spent their childhoods in, it hit me just how lucky I was they hadn’t stayed together. These two Virginia-bred, New York-seasoned folks were as incompatible as two people could be, something that had become apparent to both not long after I was born. It’s fashionable (and traditional too) to argue that families, especially black families, need to stay together to raise truly healthy kids. Well, I gotta say I don’t believe my life would have been as productive or fulfilling if Nelson Elmer George and Arizona Bacchus had not led separate lives.
So I sat in the backseat, a half smile on my face, as my father talked and my mother frowned. She didn’t like his jokes, or his cocky attitude, and really, really hated his driving. I just sat behind them, watched this awkward scene, and chuckled to myself, acknowledging that everything had actually worked out as it was supposed to.
City Kid Page 22
