by Zadie Smith
‘Right . . . OK, well, I gotta go, man . . . got stuff to do . . . So . . . Don’t you stand up any more, sister, you’ll fall – I’m out now.’
‘Wait!’
‘Aw, man . . .’
Levi approached her and she did the weirdest thing: she clasped his hands.
‘I am interested to know what your mother is like.’
‘My moms? What? Look, sister –’ said Levi, releasing his hands from hers, ‘I think you got the wrong guy.’
‘I will call on her, I think,’ she said. ‘I feel that she must be nice, from what I have seen of her family. Is she very glamorous? I don’t know why it is that I always imagine her to be very busy and glamorous.’
The thought of a busy and glamorous Kiki made Levi smile. ‘You must be thinking of someone else. My mom’s big like this’ – he stretched his hands wide across the length of the fence – ‘and bored out of her mind.’
‘Bored . . .’ she repeated, as if this were the most interesting thing anyone had ever told her.
‘Yeah, kinda like you – going a little insane in the membrane,’ he muttered, low enough so as not to be heard.
‘Well, I must confess I am a little bored myself. They are all unpacking inside – but I’m not allowed to help! Of course, I’m not terribly well,’ she confided, ‘and the pills I take . . . they make me feel strange. It’s boring for me – I’m used to being involved.’
‘Uh-huh . . . well, my mom’s having a party later – maybe you should check it out, man, shake your money-maker . . . Look, OK, sister, nice talking to you, but I gotta go now – you stay cool for me now. Stay out the sun.’
9
As sometimes happens, the song playing in Levi’s headphones ended the moment he put his hand to the gate of 83 Langham. This afternoon his home appeared more surreal a place to him than ever, as far from his idea of where he lived as seemed possible. It looked glorious. The sun had the Belsey house in her hands. She warmed the wood and made the windows opaque and splendid with reflected light. She offered herself to the brazen purple flowers that grew along the front wall, and they opened their mouths wide to receive her. It was twenty past five. The night was going to be sexy: close and warm but with enough of a breeze so that you didn’t have to sweat through it. Levi sensed women getting ready all over New England: undressing, washing, dressing again, in cleaner, sexier things; black girls in Boston oiling their legs and ironing their hair, club floors being swept, barmen turning up for work, DJs kneeling in their bedrooms, picking out records to be placed in their heavy silver boxes – all of which imaginings, usually so exciting to him, were made sour and sad by the knowledge that the only party he was going to tonight would be full of white people three times his own age. He sighed and worked his head round in a slow circle. Reluctant to go indoors, he stayed where he was, halfway up the garden path, with his head tipped forward and the departing sun on his back. Somebody had laced petunias around the triangular base of his grandmother’s statuary, a three-foot piece of pyramidal stone that sat midway between a pair of sugar maples in the front yard. Strands of lights – not yet lit – had been wound around the trunks of both these trees and laid among their branches.
Levi was thinking how grateful he was that he’d missed having to help with these tasks when he felt his pocket vibrate. He took out his pager. From Carl. It took him a minute to remember who the hell Carl was. The message said: ‘That party still on? Might swing by. Peace. C.’ Levi was both flattered and concerned. Had Carl forgotten what type of party it was? He was about to phone back when he was surprised out of his solitude by the noise of Zora climbing down from a ladder at the front of the house. Evidently she had just hung four upside-down bunches of dried tea-roses, pinks and whites, above the doorframe. Levi could not explain why he hadn’t noticed her a moment before, but he had not. On the third rung down she seemed to notice him too; her head slowly turned towards her brother, but her eyes went beyond him, intent on something across the street.
‘Wow,’ she whispered, bringing one hand up to her forehead as a visor, ‘this one really can’t believe her eyes. Check it out – she’s having some kind of cognitive failure. She’s going to malfunction.’
‘Huh?’
‘Thank you! Yes, move along now – he lives here – yes, that’s right – no crime is taking place – thank you for your interest!’
Levi turned round and saw the blushing woman Zora was yelling at, now scurrying by on the other side of the street.
‘What’s wrong with these people exactly?’ Zora put both feet on the ground and pulled off her gardening gloves.
‘She watching me? Same one from before?’
‘No, different woman. And don’t you talk to me – you were meant to be here two hours ago.’
‘Party don’t even start till eight!’
‘Starts at six, asshole – and you have once again failed to be of any help whatsoever.’
‘Zoor, man,’ sighed Levi, and walked past her, ‘you know when you’re just not in the mood?’ He pulled off his Raiders vest as he went, winding it into a ball in his hand. His naked back, so broad at the top and so narrow at the bottom, blocked Zora’s path.
‘You know, I wasn’t really in the mood to stuff three hundred tiny little vol-au-vent cases with crab paste,’ she said, following her brother through the open front door. ‘But I guess I just had to put aside my little existential crisis and get on with it.’
The hallway smelled amazing. Soul food has a scent that fills you up even before your mouth gets near any of it. The sweet dough of the pastries, the alcoholic waft of a rum punch. In the kitchen, many dishes, covered for the moment with Saran Wrap, were laid out along the main table, and, on two small card tables brought up from the basement, a great pile of plates and concentric circles of glasses. Howard stood amidst all this, holding a brandy glass filled with red wine and smoking a baggy roll-up. He had several stray pieces of tobacco stuck to his bottom lip. He was dressed in his traditional ‘cooking’ costume. This outfit – a kind of protest against the very concept of cooking – Howard constructed by donning all the discarded cook-wear clothes Kiki had purchased over the years and never used. Today Howard wore a chef’s coat, an apron, an oven mitt, several dishcloths tucked into his waistband and one tied in a jaunty fashion around his neck. An improbable quantity of flour covered all this.
‘Welcome! We’re cooking,’ said Howard. He put his mitted fingers to his lips and then tapped his nose twice.
‘And drinking,’ said Zora, removing the glass of red from his hand and taking it to the sink.
Howard appreciated the rhythm and comedy of this move and pushed on in the same vein. ‘And how was your day, John Boy?’
‘Well, someone thought I was robbin’ you again.’
‘Surely not,’ said Howard cautiously. He disliked and feared conversations with his children that concerned race, as he suspected this one would.
‘And don’t be telling me I’m paranoid,’ snapped Levi, slinging his damp vest on the table. ‘I just don’t want to live here any more, man . . . all everybody does is stare.’
‘Has anyone seen the cream?’ said Kiki, appearing from behind the door of the fridge. ‘Not the canned, not the single, not the half and half – the double English. It was on the table.’ She spotted Levi’s vest. ‘Not there, young man. In your room – which, by the way, is an absolute disgrace. If you want to move out of that basement any day soon, you’re going to have to make some changes. I’d be ashamed to have your room where anybody could see it!’
Levi frowned and continued speaking to his father. ‘And then some crazy old lady on Redwood started asking about my mom.’
‘Levi,’ said Kiki, walking over to him, ‘are you here to help or what?’
‘How do you mean? About Kiki?’ asked Howard with interest, taking a seat at the table.
‘This old lady on Redwood – I was minding my business – and she’s looking at me, looking at me, all the way down the stre
et, like everybody in this town – she stops me, speaking to me – she looked like she was trying to work out if I was gonna kill her.’
This of course was not true. But Levi had a point to make, and he would have to bend the truth to make it.
‘And then she started talking about my mom this, my mom that. Black lady.’
Howard made a noise of objection, but was overruled.
‘No, no, but that don’t make no difference. Any black lady who be white enough to live on Redwood thinks ’zackly the same way as any old white lady.’
‘Who is white enough,’ corrected Zora. ‘It’s the worst kind of pretension, you know, to fake the way you speak – to steal somebody else’s grammar. People less fortunate than you. It’s grotesque. You can decline a Latin noun, but apparently you can’t even –’
‘The cream – anybody? It was right here.’
‘I think you might be overreacting just a tad,’ said Howard, exploring the fruit bowl with his fingers. ‘Where was this?’
‘On Redwood. How many times, yo? This crazy old black lady.’
‘I don’t know how come it is that I put down something and five minutes later it . . . Redwood?’ asked Kiki sharply. ‘How far down Redwood?’
‘Just on the top corner, before the nursery.’
‘A black old lady? No one like that lives on Redwood. Who was she?’
‘I don’t know . . . There was boxes everywhere – look like she was just moving in – anyway, that ain’t even the point – point is, I’m sick of people watching me every damn step I –’
‘Oh, Jesus – Jesus . . . were you rude to her?’ demanded Kiki, putting down the bag of sugar she had in her hand.
‘What?’
‘You know who that is?’ asked Kiki rhetorically. ‘I’ll bet you that’s the Kippses moving in – I heard their place was right by here. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that was the wife.’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Howard.
‘Levi – what did the woman look like – what did she look like?’
Levi, bemused and depressed that his anecdote had met with such a heavy reception, struggled to remember details. ‘Old . . . real tall, wearing, like, very bright colours for an old lady –’
Kiki looked hard at Howard.
‘Ah . . .’ said Howard. Kiki turned back to Levi.
‘What did you say to her? You better not have been rude to her, Levi, or I swear to God, I’ll tire your ass out this evening –’
‘What? It was just some crazy . . . I don’t know – she was asking me all these weird questions . . . I don’t remember what I said – I wasn’t rude, though – I wasn’t. I barely said anything, man, and she was crazy! She was ahksing me all these questions about my mom and I was just like, I’m late – my mom’s having a party, I gotta go, I can’t talk now – and that was it.’
‘You said we were having a party.’
‘Oh, my gosh – Mom, it ain’t whoever you think it is. It’s just some crazy old woman who thought I’m gonna kill her ’cos I’m wearing a doo-rag.’
Kiki put a hand over her eyes. ‘It’s the Kippses – oh, God – I have to invite them now. I should have told Jack to invite them anyway. I have to invite them.’
‘You don’t have to invite them,’ stated Howard slowly.
‘Of course I have to invite them. I’ll go round there when I’m done with the key lime – Jerome’s out buying more alcohol – God knows what he’s doing, he ought to be back by now. Or Levi can go, drop a note off or something –’
‘What are you mad at me now? Man, I am not going back there. I was just trying to explain to you how I feel when I walk round this neighbourhood –’
‘Levi, please, I’m trying to think. Go downstairs and deal with your room.’
‘Aw, fuck you, man.’
The swearing policy in the Belsey house was not self-evident. They had nothing as twee or pointless as a swear jar (a popular household item among Wellington families), and swearing was, as we have seen, generally accepted in most situations. And yet there were several strange subclauses to this libertarian procedure, rules of practice neither written in stone nor particularly transparent. It was a question of tone and feeling, and, in this case, Levi had misjudged. Now his mother’s hand came down hard upon the side of his head, a blow that sent him stumbling back three steps into the kitchen table. He knocked a gravy boat of chocolate sauce over himself. In normal circumstances, faced with the smallest slight to himself or his character, and, in particular, his clothes, Levi would argue for justice for as long as he had breath in his body, even when – especially when – he was in the wrong. But on this occasion he left the room at once without a word. A minute later they heard his door downstairs slamming.
‘Good. Nice party,’ said Zora.
‘You wait till the guests arrive,’ murmured Howard.
‘I just want to teach him to . . .’ began Kiki. She felt exhausted. She sat down at the kitchen table and rested her head on its Scandinavian pine.
‘I’ll go out and cut you a switch, shall I? Bit of parenting, Florida style,’ said Howard, making a show of taking off his hat and his apron. In the family context, whenever Howard saw an opportunity to take the moral high ground he pretty much catapulted himself towards it. These opportunities had been rare recently. When Kiki lifted her head, he had already left the room. That’s right, thought Kiki, quit while you’re ahead. Just then Jerome came through the door and paused in the kitchen for a moment to mumble that the wine was in the hallway, before proceeding straight through the sliding doors to the back garden.
‘I don’t know why everybody in this house has to behave like a goddamn animal,’ said Kiki with sudden ferocity. She stood up and went to the sink to wet a cloth, returning to go to work on the spilled chocolate. She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I’ll never stop – you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospital. A backlog of sadness for which there would never be sufficient time.
‘I’m done with this,’ said Zora, swirling a spoon listlessly through the fruit punch she had helped to make. ‘I’m going to get changed or something.’
‘Zoor,’ said Kiki, ‘do you know where I could find a pen and paper?’
‘Eyeano. Drawer?’
Zora too wandered away. Kiki heard a great splash from outside, and then glimpsed the dark, curled dome of Jerome’s head before it went under the water again. She opened the drawer at her end of the long kitchen table and, among many batteries and fake fingernails, found a pen. She went in search of paper. She recalled a pad that had been squeezed between two paperbacks on a bookshelf in the hallway.
‘Chess?’ Kiki heard Zora ask Howard. When she came back into the kitchen, she could see them setting up play in the lounge as if nothing at all had happened, as if they didn’t have a party to host, Murdoch happily ensconced in Howard’s lap. Chess? Is that what it’s like, wondered Kiki, to be an intellectual? Can the tuned mind tune everything else out? Kiki sat alone in the kitchen. She wrote a short note welcoming the Kippses to town and expressing the hope they might attend a little gathering, any time after six thirty.
10
Turning the corner of Redwood, Kiki was already busy reading the signs. The size of the moving van, the style of the house, the colours of the garden. The light was fading and the streetlamps were not yet lit. It bugged her that she was unable to see more clearly the hanging baskets suspended like censers from the four storeys of balconies. Kiki was quite close to the front gate before she saw the outline of a tall woman sitting in a high-backed chair. Kiki put the letter she held in her hand back into her pocket. The woman was asleep. Kiki understood at once that she would never wish to be seen like this, with her thinning hair fanned out across her cheek, her mouth wide open and half of one fluttering, unseeing eyeball revealed to the world. It seemed rude to walk past her and continue to the doorbell, as if she were nothing more signif
icant than a cat or an ornament. Equally, it didn’t seem right to wake her. On the porch now and hesitating, Kiki had the momentary fancy of placing the note in the woman’s lap and running away. She took another step towards the door; the woman woke.
‘Hi, hi – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you – I’m a neighbour here . . . are you . . . Mrs Kipps or . . .’
The woman smiled lazily and looked at Kiki, around Kiki, apparently assessing her bulk, where it began and where it ended. Kiki pulled her cardigan around herself.
‘I’m Kiki Belsey.’
Now Mrs Kipps made a jubilant sound of realization, beginning on a reed-thin high note and slowly making its way down the scale. She brought her long hands together slowly like a pair of cymbals.
‘Yes, I’m Jerome’s mother – I think you bumped into my youngest today, Levi? I hope he wasn’t rude at all . . . he can be a little brash sometimes – ’
‘I knew I was right. I knew it, you see.’
Kiki laughed in an unhinged way, still concentrating on taking in all the visual information about this much discussed, never before glimpsed entity, Mrs Kipps.
‘Isn’t it crazy? The coincidence of Jerome, and then you and Levi bumping – ’
‘No coincidence at all – I knew him by his face the moment I saw him. They’re so alive to look at, your sons, so handsome.’
Kiki was vulnerable to compliments concerning her children, but she was also familiar with them. Three brown children of a certain height will attract attention wherever they go. Kiki was used to the glory of it and also the necessity of humility.
‘Do you think so? I guess they are – I always think of them still as babies, really, without any –’ began Kiki happily, but Mrs Kipps continued over her, unheeding.
‘And now this is you,’ she said, whistling and reaching out to grab Kiki’s hand by the wrist. ‘Come here, come down.’
‘Oh . . . OK,’ said Kiki. She crouched beside Mrs Kipps’s chair.
