A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

  “No trouble,” Valerie said. “Beach balls do that.”

  The friend said, “Hi! I’m Pepper. You must be Zay’s mom.”

  “I am. Nice to meet you, Pepper. Are you girls having a good summer?”

  “So far, so good,” Pepper said. “Looking forward to going to Juniper’s beach house. Her parents are so nice to let me come. I hate being stuck here in summer, and my parents are always working—they own a restaurant. I work there, too. Not as much as them. As they. I love the beach. Do you?”

  Valerie watched Pepper with amusement—and gratitude that her own child didn’t operate at this speed. The girl could wear a person out fast. She was a real contrast to quiet, watchful Juniper. Valerie said, “I do enjoy the beach, but maybe for different reasons than you-all. I like to go to the marshes and muck around there. Ecology is one of my specialties. I’m no expert on the coastal region, though, so it’s always a treat to go and learn something new. Also, my gram was from out that way, in Beaufort. I heard lots of stories, growing up.”

  “I want to study ecology,” Juniper said. “And botany, and maybe zoology, too.”

  Valerie said, “That’s ambitious. Do it.”

  “You don’t think it’s too much?”

  “As I tell my students, nothing is too much unless you decide it is. And you can’t make an informed decision if you don’t try first.”

  Pepper said, “I want to do textiles and fashion design.”

  “I could use some fashion design myself,” Valerie said, indicating her faded Prince T-shirt and cutoff sweat pants.

  Juniper pointed at the compost bin. “I think you’re dressed just right for the occasion.”

  The girl had a sense of humor. Valerie could appreciate that. And she approved heartily of Juniper’s interests. And she’d enjoyed the conversation that ensued from here, a discussion of how composting worked and why to do it and what to do with the material when it was “done.” Juniper was inquisitive, bright, sociable enough, open—though neither she nor Valerie spoke of Xavier even once.

  None of this, however, meant Valerie was any less reluctant to endorse Zay’s interest in Juniper than she’d been before.

  She said to Chris, “I understand why he likes her. I just don’t want him to.”

  “As the great bard sayeth, ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.’ That’s been my experience, anyway.”

  “It’s true. Sadly. Happily. Why does everything have to be so complicated?”

  Chris said, “It doesn’t. What do you say we flip that coin?”

  She stared in surprise. He looked serious. “Do you want to?”

  They gazed at each other. Chris waggled his eyebrows. Valerie laughed and said, “Maybe wait until after I get a second cocktail in me.”

  * * *

  Chris had called Valerie prickly, and we would agree that this was a fair descriptor for how she’d been behaving in recent days. She’d agree, too, and she didn’t like feeling that way. She hoped the lawsuit would be resolved in short order so that everything and everyone would more or less go back to normal. What she’d said to Xavier bears repeating: she knew the Whitmans would never be her friends and she was all right with that. She was okay with being seen by some as too passionate about her issues—surely there’d been people around Rosa Parks who wanted her to let well enough alone. Surely some of the Reverend Dr. King’s friends had told him he might be going too far. Not that environmental protection was quite the same thing as civil rights, and not that she was on par with any of the real warriors. But she had to do what she could, that was just how she was built.

  See Valerie when she’d left home for college, high on winning a full-ride scholarship to nearby Michigan State University. Having nourished herself for years on Nina Simone’s sixties hit “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” she was now eighteen years old, a petite dynamo with chin-length Janet Jackson hair, oversized tees, baggy jeans, high-top sneakers, and a can-do attitude about saving the planet. She’d just spent four years with her head down, nose in her books, aiming for the grades that would carry her out of that duplex where “Uncle” Ray lived upstairs—with his mother now, probably thinking about his good old days of flashing Valerie and hoping for Mama to pass soon so that he could pick up where he’d left off; there was a new family of girls next door.

  Learning, for Valerie, was like eating for most of us. It energized and sustained her. It gave her power on a lot of levels. It gave her purpose. Had she been born a decade or two earlier, her energies might have been put to the ongoing civil rights movement. As it was, she believed the cause that now needed people like her was the environment. She believed she could contribute more there. She was not prickly back then, she was sharp. Well—not sharp like fashionable. She’d never been that. Sharp like intelligent, energetic, ambitious.

  During holiday breaks and summer vacation, she volunteered her time any and every place she could get to that needed kids who’d clear trash and pull weeds, who’d build and plant community gardens, who’d lead grade-school children on educational hikes, who’d count birds or deer, who’d sample water from creeks and streams, who’d chart data and write proposals that organizations could then take to politicians (back in the days when climate change wasn’t a partisan issue).

  She’d been as terrified to be in college as she was excited to get there. Suppose she failed? Suppose she sat in those classrooms with their white professors and white students and made a poor showing? Suppose everyone was smarter than she was, and all she’d prove was that black girls didn’t deserve a spot, didn’t deserve a chance?

  But no. She’d excelled there, too. A B.S. in forestry. Then a dual Ph.D. in ag and ecology. When she finished her education, she’d been as hopeful as a black woman could be in America, or maybe anywhere. Job offers came from several solid universities and a couple of prestigious ones. She had her pick of five different states, so she picked the one with the climate and biodiversity she liked best: North Carolina, a state with an incredible array of plant and animal life due to its wide variety of ecosystems. Appalachian highlands on one end, coastal estuaries on the other, and in between, hills and rivers, forests and plains, protected parklands and huge swaths of farms. Cotton. Peanuts. Tobacco. Hogs. Horses. Strawberries! Valerie loved strawberries. North Carolina was the home she’d always wanted, thanks in part to Gram and her stories. And before long, she met the man she’d always wanted—though she hadn’t known who that man was until she met Tom Holt.

  Tom was eight years older than Valerie; she didn’t care.

  Tom was Southern and white; Valerie didn’t care. (Her family did, but she didn’t care about that, either.)

  Tom had, in his youth, tried on communism—in its idealized state, he always said, defending himself from those who imagined him buddying up to Stalin or Mao Zedong (who were dead, but still). Valerie did not care. Or rather, she thought all of these things were the facets of his character and life that made him interesting. Mainly he was an intelligent, freethinking, passionate young professor whose pet cause was social justice. Tom wanted to do with society what Valerie wanted to do with the environment, and what was not to like about that? Also? He was six-three and handsome. Blond. Violet eyes. Valerie’s colleague Michelle called him Ken, after the doll. Grinning, Tom remarked, “Barbie should be so lucky.”

  We might digress and tell you, here, all about Tom’s family and their struggle to accept Valerie as his chosen mate. We might describe how Valerie’s family—her mother, especially—had the same struggle in reverse. Neither family could say they were surprised; they knew better. Why, though, would anyone choose to take on the challenges of interracial marriage (especially in the South) when there were so many good reasons not to? Well, said Valerie and Tom, even if the problems they’d face weren’t simple, the answer was: love.

  But getting into all the particulars here would be telling you something we’re sure you can more or less imagine for y
ourself, so instead, we’ll tell you what happened to Tom.

  23

  Having avoided visits home to Jackson, Mississippi, for more than a year since Xavier’s birth, Tom Holt-Alston agreed to take his wife and now-toddling son to visit his mother and the extended family for Thanksgiving. They’d flown into the recently renamed Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport, a grand-sounding moniker that overstates the actual experience of travelers there.

  In size, Jackson-Evers is on the lesser end of small—though not tiny. The main thing to emphasize here is that the state of Mississippi’s largest airport bears the name of a black hero of the civil rights movement, while the state itself continues to fly a flag that has as a significant part of its design the entire flag of the Confederacy. This kind of dichotomy is the South in a nutshell.

  As so many family holiday gatherings are, this one, which was now concluding, had been pleasant in some aspects, an ordeal in others. The food was excellent, so there was that. And little Xavier was a trouper, sociable and willing to go from stranger to stranger (as they were to him) to have his gorgeous baby-smooth light brown skin and wild-curly gold-toned hair remarked upon again and again, mostly by the younger women who, like Tom, had rejected the prejudice they’d been suckled on.

  Valerie, too, was a good sport. Some of the family had met her at the wedding, so she was not so exotic to them as she’d seemed at first. (As if none of Tom’s parents’ generation had ever spoken with a black woman who wasn’t serving them in some way or other.) No one exclaimed over her skin or hair. However, some of them did ask her questions that rode the margin of offense. Such as, Was her daddy employed? Did she sing in her church’s gospel choir? Did she hate her hair? Valerie fielded the questions with outward grace, the way she’d been taught to do.

  Xavier and Valerie: managing well. Tom: not as well, in part because he could see how put-on the sweet behavior of some of the family was, same as it’d been at the wedding. But mainly because on Friday morning after breakfast, while Valerie was upstairs in the Holt homestead changing Xavier’s diaper and getting him ready for their trip home, Tom’s great-uncle Brooks started in on Tom.

  Brooks, Tom, and Tom’s mother were in the dining room with their coffee. Brooks, a tall man like Tom but with another forty years and forty pounds on him, had been talking about Tom’s father and grandfather (Brooks’s older brother) and how poetic it was that the two men had died together doing a thing they’d loved: crop-dusting. Brooks was oddly enamored with this story (possibly because the event had made him the Holt patriarch) and could be counted on to wax nostalgic over it whenever he had a captive audience. But then apropos of nothing more than the fact that Tom was at the table with him, he changed course and said to Tom, “Well, son, I guess this is too late to fix now—legally anyway—but that child of yours, well, you’ve made an abomination. If you were my boy bringing it and that woman home, I wouldn’t have you in the house.”

  “Brooks!” said Tom’s mother. “Stop it now. I told you, I won’t tolerate you causing trouble.”

  “I’ve tried to keep quiet like you asked, but a man’s got to speak up when he sees wrong being done.”

  “You spoke up before the wedding,” Tom said. “And you see how much I cared about your opinions then.”

  “That’s right. You, being stupid and corrupted, went ahead and married a girl you should’ve been content to just fuck, and then you bastardized your name, too. Holt-Alston? Pathetic, all of it.” He spat on the floor.

  “Brooks, really!” said Mrs. Holt, presumably due to fuck more than the spitting.

  Tom pointed at Brooks. “You’re the abomination. Ignorant, racist sons of bitches like you are what’s wrong with this state—with this country.”

  “See here,” said Brooks, standing up from the table and going to the opposite side where Tom sat. He towered over Tom and put his finger in his face. “What’s wrong with this country is boys like you disrespecting men like me who know God’s word and follow it, same as you ought to do.”

  Tom pushed Brooks’s hand away. “Sit down, old man,” he said calmly. “This is none of your business, anyway. I’m leaving in a half hour and you can go right back to being a bigot, but for now, kindly show some respect for my mother, at least, and shut your filthy mouth.”

  “Shut my mouth?” Brooks said. He put his finger in Tom’s face again. “You’d better—”

  Tom stood up. “I’d better what?”

  “Tommy,” his mother said, “don’t give him the satisfaction.”

  Brooks, eyes narrowed, said, “You never did belong in this family. Why, if it wasn’t a slanderous insult to your mother to say so, I might suppose you’d been sired by some traveling … communist.” He spat again. “Highfalutin nigger-loving socialist that you are.”

  Tom said, “Sociologist. Get out of my face.”

  “That’s enough!” Mrs. Holt said.

  The men glared at each other. When Brooks wouldn’t move, Tom turned around, seething with anger but unwilling to give the son of a bitch one more moment of his attention. You could never win with these kinds of people, and he was sorry he’d let Brooks get him this riled up.

  As he turned and started to leave the dining room, he caught his foot on his chair and stumbled, losing his balance and falling against the china hutch before landing on the floor. Brooks started laughing. Several pieces of dishware toppled along with Tom, breaking as they hit.

  The noise brought Valerie hurrying down the stairs, with Xavier in her arms. Tom was getting up, but slowly, with one hand pressed to his head. Mrs. Holt was beside him.

  “Are you all right?” Valerie asked Tom. “What happened?”

  “Your meal ticket tripped on his big fancy ideals,” said Brooks, who’d moved back to the other side of the table and taken his seat. Valerie refused to acknowledge him.

  Tom said, “Sorry, Mama, I’ll pay for what broke.”

  “Don’t bother yourself about that.”

  Valerie said, “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine. Except that asshole is still my relative.”

  “Please quit it,” Mrs. Holt said. “This doesn’t do anybody any good.”

  Tom nodded. “I know, I’m sorry to upset you. Can I help you clean this up?”

  “No, you have a plane. We’ll manage it.”

  Tom said, “All right, then,” and turned to Valerie and Xavier. “You ready? Let’s get him into the car. I’ll grab the luggage.”

  While Tom went upstairs, Valerie said good-bye to Mrs. Holt, ignoring Brooks, while Xavier, who was alert and wide-eyed and quiet, allowed his grandmother to hug him once more. “Come see us at Christmas,” Valerie said, trying to keep her voice level, wishing she could add, Because you’ll never see my son or me in this house again. Not until Brooks was dead, anyway.

  Tom spoke little during the drive to the airport. Valerie didn’t find this concerning. She’d overheard enough of the argument between him and Brooks to know why Tom would be fuming, turning the thing around in his mind, thinking of how he might have handled it differently.

  On the flight to Atlanta, with Xavier napping in the seat between them, Tom asked Valerie, “Do you have some Tylenol in your purse?”

  “I think so—why? Headache?”

  He nodded. “I hit my head on the dining hutch.”

  She dug around in her purse and found the bottle of pills. “I wish the two of you hadn’t provoked each other like that.”

  “I wish Brooks would crawl into a hole and never come out.”

  “Cosign,” she said. “Do you have a lump?”

  Tom reached up to the spot where he’d hit. “I do. A real goose egg.”

  “You should have said something earlier. We could’ve iced it. Want to ring for the flight attendant to bring some ice? They probably have first-aid packs—”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  In the Atlanta airport, Tom asked again for Tylenol.

  “The first ones didn’t help?”
r />   “Not really.”

  “You shouldn’t take them too close together—”

  “Another two won’t make me OD.”

  “No, I guess not,” Valerie said, and gave him the pills.

  He waited for the connecting flight with his eyes closed, head resting back against his seat, while Valerie walked Xavier around and around the gate area. She was thinking about the work she had ahead of her—finals to administer and grade, papers to read and grade, grades to figure and post … She was thinking about Xavier and snacks, Xavier and the runny nose he’d developed, Xavier and all this luggage he and she had to navigate as they went around and around the gate area. She was thinking about what a bigoted asshole Brooks was, and wondering how she’d handle Tom’s mother’s future invitations to visit. Therefore, she wasn’t thinking much at all about Tom, who appeared to be uncomfortable but otherwise all right.

  Sometime mid-flight he said, “I think I might have a concussion. What are the symptoms, do you know?”

  “Headache?” she said, trying to recall anything she might have heard about it. “Mental fuzziness? Blurred vision, maybe?”

  “My vision is a little bit blurry.”

  Valerie, in the window seat, said, “Look this way, let me see your eyes.” He did, and she leaned toward him over Xavier’s head for a close look. “Huh. Your pupil—the right one—is dilated. Just the right one.”

  Tom put his hand over his left eye. “Yep. That’s the blurry one. Well, shit. I guess I should see somebody about it in the morning.”

  “You think you should wait?”

  “I’m not going to spend the whole night waiting in the ER with all the other pathetic, unwashed fools who didn’t have the sense not to get sick or injured on a holiday weekend instead of during regular office hours.”

  “You do smell kind of ripe,” Valerie said—a nervous attempt at a joke. “Still—”

  “Let’s see how it goes,” Tom told her. “I just want this headache to let up so I can think straight.”