Near the ramp leading to my first classroom, a blur calls at me. “Auntie Monique, Auntie Mo.” When we get close to the sound, I see that it is my nephew James, same age as me, a month older actually, standing next to his mother, my sister Valeria.
The teacher is at the door now. She is the same teacher who taught and loved Byron and Troy and Carl. The same teacher who taught and loved Lynette and Karen. Every one of my siblings except Simon Jr. had passed through these doors and now it was my turn. What’s your name little girl the teacher is wanting to know.
Tell those people …
“Sarah,” I say.
I have been named Sarah, I come to know, after Sarah McCutcheon (for her love of beauty) and Ms. Sarah from the Divine Mission (for her love of God) and for another Sarah, a nice lady who worked at the laundromat near the corner of Wilson and Chef. I have been told that I was named Monique because Michael, who was in Charity Hospital’s psych ward tripping on LSD when I was born, insisted that the new baby’s name start with an M so that we would be forever aligned, alphabetically at least. No one at home calls me Sarah until I am older and they want to make fun or put me back in my place. Later, when friends call home asking for Sarah and Carl answers the phone he will say, “Sarah who? You got the wrong number. Ain’t no Sarah here.”
There are only two people in this school who know who I really am. They are James (my nephew) and Alvin (my neighbor). But Alvin is in the third grade already, on the other end of the building, down a long hallway, past the cafeteria and the library, in one of the classes held in trailers, outside.
At playtime the boys, who are mostly Vietnamese—everyone in this school is black or Vietnamese—call me Syrup or Surrah or Searah. Because I know that Sarah is not my actual name, I don’t correct them. I let myself go by all possible names. When I get home, I change out of the uniform and the name and meet Alvin in the giant oak tree in front of Ms. Octavia’s house where he lives.
In the beginning, Alvin is my rough-playing next-door neighbor. By the time his mother dies when he is eleven—and suddenly so—he will be my soul brother and closest friend. Our relationship is so long that I cannot remember ever first meeting. He is hide-and-go-seek in wet summer air and five-cent Laffy Taffys with knock-knock jokes on the wrapper.
Alvin is the one who dares me to throw my elbow through the glass window of our den as a happy birthday present to him when he turns ten. I happily oblige, appearing afterward in the den where my brothers are watching a Saints game, Lynette’s bedsheet wrapped around my arm, dripping with blood. One of my brothers (now I can’t remember who, but the only one to stop and mind me) says, “Go head on now, you all right” and turns back to the game. Mom rushes me to Charity Hospital in the yellow Aries; the elbow is stitched. Alvin loves me in the way of a male buddy from then on, I think.
Alvin is brown skinned with red coloring and has soft, curly hair. His lips seem made for kisses; they are big and smothering. I call him Liver Lip in play; he calls me Olive Oyl after Popeye’s rail-thin, awkward-walking woman. We go tit for tat like this. Hours go by.
Alvin is first to kiss my slivers of lip. I lean out the front window of our living room, over the cactus bush that Mom planted in the world before me. Alvin swallows my mouth whole. “Lean your head sideways, move your nose out the way,” he keeps on saying. It is the grossest thing in the world.
On our long walks to school together we cross the sinister Chef Menteur Highway, just as Karen and Carl once did. The goal, Alvin says, is to survive Chef Menteur. Alvin, who is three years older than me, grips my hand and seemingly spirits me across. Once safe, off we go, running for no reason, past the Ratville apartment complex on the long side of Wilson where Carl’s first girlfriend, Monica, lives, past indistinct nubs of houses to where Gant and the long side of Wilson intersect, where we wait for the crossing guard to flag us across.
Alvin has a mother who we call Big Karen to distinguish her from my sister and a disappeared father whose name we never call. Big Karen is rarely seen, except for when she moves the curtain on the front window of Ms. Octavia’s house, spots Alvin and me playing in the tree, then pokes the side of her face out of the door. “Get to school” or “Come on in here, boy” is all I ever hear her say. I see Big Karen’s entire body exactly once: Buying candy in Ms. Octavia’s house and using her bathroom, I run into Karen in the kitchen. She’s wearing brown pants, the itchy-looking kind, with elastic at the waist. Black hair hangs down her back. She seems, in an illogical way, the most memorable adult in my growing up. I always dwell on absences, I think, more than the presences.
On weekends, adults seem to vanish anyway, and the short end of Wilson where Alvin and I live is overrun with children. Neighbor JoJo’s daughter Renaya comes. So does Kendra from the trailer park next door. Valeria drops off James and Tahneetra. Toka, Darryl’s firstborn, comes over, and so does Lil Michael, Michael’s firstborn who is two months older than me. I am these people’s Auntie even though I am still peeing in the bed. But I have the title and the title is what matters. Lynette teaches me that. “Lil girl, lil girl,” she is always saying. “I’m your big sister. You need to remember that if you don’t remember nothing else.” Karen was the oldest daughter still living at home, but Lynette acted it. Her job, as she saw it, was to control me.
Mostly we kids play hide-and-go-seek, which we mostly call “It,” in the grassy spaces between the narrow houses. There are few places to avoid being found. You can crouch behind a car until the driver backs out, as my brothers always do, leaving me in the wide open and exposed. Or sometimes one of my loudmouthed brothers sees me crouching and pulling up grasses in the time between hiding and getting caught and gives me away, something Troy does religiously. Or else I’ll try to hide behind a tree that I’ve deluded myself into believing is wide enough to cover me. All of this to avoid the best hiding places that require getting close to the spongy earth, underneath Ms. Octavia’s house, for instance, which looks precariously lifted, sitting on evenly spaced stacks of brick. Big Karen’s dog is vicious too. If you run in the yard between Ms. Octavia’s and Joyce’s houses, he’ll chase you to the limits of his metal chain, barking and drooling and nipping at the backs of your feet. Only the brave hide under Ms. Octavia’s house where the ground seems to be melting. Everyone understands that no one will search underneath there; you’d be left in your self-inflicted misery for however long you could stand it. Who knew what you would come out looking like. No one cared if that’s what you wanted to do to yourself. That spot is reserved for those more terrified of being “It” than being eaten by the squishy earth.
We tell stories of how the ground eats things whole. That ball you left outside, we say, where do you think it went? A certain section of ground is quicksand, we decide, over there, back by Ms. Octavia’s shed. It will take you in if you aren’t careful. When it rains hard, water collects and stays for days. In our child-wise minds, the seal between deep ground and our present reality above that ground is string thin.
I hate being “It.” Searching for people who do not want to be found, who when discovered yell like maniacal banshees and then run from you, afraid of the invisible scourge you are trying to pass on. With my poor eyesight, I often find a hiding person by mistake, just bumping into them by accident.
For these reasons, I do everything “It” is not supposed to do. I count with one eye open to see in which general direction the others run. And, too, many times in the middle of the game when others are hiding out-of-doors, waiting to be found, I’ll stop being “It” without saying a word to anyone except myself, go inside, and call it a night.
By the time I’m seven, our house has become a studious house. In the evenings, Mom studies for nursing exams. But she keeps failing the required tests after six-week courses, where she is always the oldest student, and restudying for them, still working, in the meantime, with Auntie Elaine at Sisters of the Holy Family, a facility she praises for not smelling like piss. She studies for her GED, too, and re
ads everything she sees. I was always a person who desired to be … I recognize I’m a good mom, but I wanted to be more than that.
On Sundays, at Pastor Simmons’s church, she is often called up to the podium to read Bible verses she has nearly memorized, articulating every single syllable into the mic. I love it best when she says the number “nine,” pronouncing it NI-YEN. And at home, how she calls lasagna LA-ZAND-YAY.
Lynette is the first to break family tradition when she tests out of Jefferson Davis and into Schaumburg Elementary, the school in New Orleans East for “gifted” kids, which is too far for walking.
I am already being given standardized tests in school, which I don’t mind. Playing school has become my entire life. I unearth boxes of slightly mildewed paper from underneath the stairs at home. I love the smell and feel of paper. It stands for abundance. You can collect reams of it, even when you have little. People waste it, throw it out, take it for granted.
In the boys’ room, I make up multiple-choice tests for my students, the inanimate stuffed creatures I’ve collected, including a black Cabbage Patch doll named Cynthia and Peter the Pink Rabbit, then take twenty-five pieces of paper, one for each student, and go through them writing the answers to each of the questions I have made up. With my bad vision, it is easy to manufacture random answers. After this harried exercise (timed just as the standardized tests in school are) where I fill out my imaginary students’ tests, I pass the pages back to the waiting pupils who eye me the way they always eye me—trancelike—then I collect them back and pretend to grade them, sitting behind an ironing board that folds out from the wall in the boys’ mostly empty room upstairs in the crown. After I grade the tests, I record the scores, then scold the students for their carelessness, for their failing grades. Had they not read the questions?
From time to time, I talk James and Alvin into being my real-live students, but when they are playing with me school lasts only half an hour. James and Alvin do not like class—the real or imagined kind. And I am too harsh a teacher.
Some days, I decide to make the kitchen a stop on a field trip with my stuffed students.
My mother is always on the telephone, the cord twisting around her waist. She spends almost all day on the line with Grandmother. Or else speaking pig Latin on the phone with Auntie Elaine. Isthay ildchay isway ettinggay onway ymay amnday ervesnay. This child is listening to every word I say.
I am sitting in my chair, my back to the side door where the familiars enter, watching her at the kitchen sink, steam rising off the dishrag. Scalding water kills the germs, she is always saying. She wipes the counters down with bleach. Sure Clean, she calls it. In the window, where she is facing, there is an ivy plant and, in a Styrofoam cup, an avocado seed that she thinks will grow, but never does.
Mom throws away a chipped dish. If a plate or cup chips, I don’t care how beautiful it is, throw it away immediately, she is always saying. When she talks to us like out of thin air, we are supposed to remember. Underneath the sink where the cleaning supplies stay there are holes in the wood that are wet and ugly and slippery like swamp mold, from the pipe underneath the sink that leaks dishwater.
I fuss at the teddy bears who are seated around the table. At real school, at Jefferson Davis, Yogi Bear shows up in the cafeteria with a police officer to tell us “Just say no” to drugs. I hammer this message over and over into my fake students. “Just say no,” I say. I had learned the word “rebuke” at Sunday school and liked it. “Just rebuke those drugs!” Get from round here with all that, Mom says without looking at me. We will not stay long then, I tell the students. The kitchen table is oval with a white lace tablecloth draping down to touch my leg. On top of it sits a cake, high on a glass pedestal, with white icing made from lemon juice and powdered sugar the way Grandmother taught, drawn on in flourishes with a butter knife. Random cakes when it is not a birthday are for company.
“Can I have some?” I still want to know.
My mother stirs a pot on the stove.
I change tack.
“The teddy bear needs a pickle,” I say to Mom who moves around seven-year-old me like I am invisible.
If the house is a kingdom, my mother is the rightful ruler and Lynette the despot. For this reason, play school does not extend to the girls’ room where I sleep in a twin bed across from Lynette. In photographs, I am always holding up rabbit ear fingers behind her head. “Mah!” she is always calling out. When I taunt her about her Jheri curl, the abundance of spray she uses to keep it moist under the plastic bag she wears, “Mah!”
My mother rarely answers. Lynette yells out my transgressions anyway.
I am, on the surface, the opposite of Lynette, wild in how I do things, in a perpetual hurry, and unconcerned with physical appearance. When I am eight, I fall in love with a black sweater that has pink and purple psychedelic elephants marching across it and wear it every single day, never desiring another outfit. But Lynette is always on the verge of acquiring something new, if not in real life, then in her imaginary world. She spends all of her time drawing, lying across her twin bed, shaking her foot, one hand on her head, moving colored pencils around. The women all look like her, small faced and lanky, but dressed in ball gowns and gray suits, with top hats and high-heeled pumps. They all have moles on their faces, just above the lip, which Lynette wishes she had and sometimes draws on her own face.
Lynette is a member of various after-school and church clubs, admired for her looks. She loves mirrors. We have four of them posted up in our bedroom where she sits before them and makes a thousand selves. Lynette has taken all of Mom’s quiet lessons about poise and cleanliness to heart. Through the years, the women on paper multiply, wearing their fancy box hats and pointy-toed shoes, living in piles beneath Lynette’s mattress or as cutouts dancing across our pink walls.
She imagines herself a fashionista in a universe of styleless people, which lends her wardrobe the air of costume. Working with Mom, she sews a pair of red corduroy bell-bottoms, which hang in the doorway between our room and the kitchen for the longest time, swaying for all to see.
When she is fourteen and I am nine she starts wearing too much lip gloss. The stickiness collects and drips off slowly. “Catch it,” I’ll say. “It’s running!”
“Mah!” Lynette calls.
On weekends, Lynette puts on talent shows in the backyard so that we become new people she likes and wants to play with. She gives each of us nicknames. James becomes Blacky Boo J. Blacky for his coloration. James took the name to heart, using it to describe himself even after he was grown. His sister, Tahneetra, and I have forgettable names. She is Prissy Pritina or some such thing and I am always a Princess Something. Lynette dresses us and following her stage directions, we parade around the backyard on the raised concrete platform where Mom hangs clothes to dry.
She has become the art director of family memory, organizing photographs and presenting the story of us in books with labels handwritten in her curlicue. Our differences have irked her enough that she begins labeling my pictures “Rosemary’s Baby,” which I find funny because I have not seen the movie. Several things lead to this unfortunate name:
On trips to Schwegmann’s Super Market, usually Mom’s away time, I make a job of finding things I need in order to teach my fake classes—staplers and paper and chalk that we can’t afford. When Mom tells me no, I pitch a fit, get on the floor, and yell, ignoring the one time Mom demands I get up. She says things only once. I know this. I also know that there are two traits she won’t tolerate in children: sneakiness and embarrassment by them. I qualify for the latter.
These public behaviors make me a candidate for regularly scheduled spankings, delivered by a switch in Mom’s soft hands. I am responsible for retrieving my own stick from the bay leaf tree in the backyard, near Ms. Octavia’s shed where the quicksand is, which also happens to be where the dead dogs I heard about, but never met, are buried. My brothers always talk about how, in the world before me, there was a dog for each child.
If it rained hard, I reason, the animal carcasses would come floating up and back to our side of living. This poses a problem for me when it comes to playing outside in the wet, after it has rained, whenever the ground is soft.
Mother spanks me in silence. Afterward I run into the living room where we are not supposed to be and threaten to call “child protection services” on the rotary phone. My mother says, Go right ahead, please call them, and that deflates the whole thing.
For these antics, I am left at home a lot and find myself looking out from the front French windows, crying, the two cedar trees in front seeming to heckle as Lynette and Mom back out of the driveway. I try to make sure they see my face contorting even though I can’t see far enough to verify that they are looking at me. I claw and preen in the window, but after they are gone and I am without an audience, I am happy to be alone in the house with one of my brothers barely watching me.
If it is Christmastime, I get down under the tree and open the gifts—not mine, but everyone else’s. Afterward, I retape the packages as best I can, but I am in a hurry, my heart racing, to move on to the next thing; I am sloppy.
One time, I am left at home with Michael who is supposed to be keeping an eye on me. Michael is a grown man in his twenties, working twelve-hour days as a cook in the French Quarter, but he is passing through the house with a girlfriend. They are upstairs. I am in the den watching Fred Flintstone make his car go with his feet. I like what is playing on the TV but become more interested in what is sitting on top of it. Underneath Michael’s fist-handled hair pick sits a ten-dollar bill, which I go and take without a thought.
Ms. Octavia sells candy, pickles, and frozen Kool-Aid that we call huckabucks. My favorite things are Now and Laters, which I always eat now; and banana Laffy Taffys. For me, eating candy is an activity. If my body isn’t moving, my mouth needs to be and whenever my mouth isn’t moving, I fixate on the shape of certain things on my tongue. Just the thought of Laffy Taffys and my tongue would lust so much I could taste the sweetness in my saliva. Laffy Taffys have three knock-knock jokes inside the wrapper so while I am chewing through the candy—which I like to put inside my mouth whole to give it a filled-up feeling—I crack myself up on at least one.
The Yellow House Page 12
