The Summer We Got Free (15 page)

Everyone came to the
Delaneys
’
Christmas party that next Saturday. Most people brought cakes and pies and
other desserts to share, and some brought libations. Maddy and her mother brought
peach cobbler and beer. Chuck and Lena came with their two kids and brought one
of Lena’s not-sweet-enough coconut cakes, plus a couple of bottles of George’s
favorite cheap wine. “This so cheap, the vintage is
next
year,” George said, and they all exploded in laughter.
Christmas records played. Some people danced and most people sang. The house
smelled of spiced apples and nutmeg and peppermint.

Ava spent the first half-hour of the party up in her
room, finishing a drawing, ignoring her father’s repeated calls for her to come
down. When she finally did come down, she went straight to the plates full of
cookies that were set out on the dining room table. Geo came over to her, frowning,
loosening his tie a little and looking like he wanted to rip it off. “Cheer
up,” she said, “It’s just for a—”

“Couple more
hours? That’s easy for you to say. Dresses aint bad. But I don’t know what fool
thought up ties. Who wants to feel like they’re—
”

“Being strangled?”

He nodded, stuck his finger in the space between the
tie knot and his neck and wiggled it, grimacing.

Ava saw Miss
Maddy’s
daughter, Ellen, across the room and waved to her. Ellen bounced over and
kissed Ava’s cheek. Ava frowned and wiped the wetness off. “What you do that
for?”

Ellen shrugged,
then
kissed
Geo’s cheek. He grinned.

“If you hoping that frog’s gone turn into a prince,” a
familiar voice yelled, “you gone be disappointed.”

They all turned and saw Sondra
Liddy
by the layer cake, sneering, while Lamar guffawed beside her. Ava rolled her
eyes.

“I can’t believe your parents invited the
Caseys
,” Ellen whispered. “I mean, the
Liddys
I can understand, but the
Caseys
? They’re
so
terrible.”

They were terrible. Lamar especially. Not a week went
by when he didn’t get in trouble for hitting somebody at school, or for
stealing something.

“Our Mama invites them every year,” Geo said. “She says
it’s the Christian thing to do.”

Ava nodded. “But she hid all our records and toys and
stuff, and locked our Christmas presents in the closet. She’s Christian, but
she aint stupid.”

A couple of hours into the party, the punchbowl
cracked and Regina asked George to go down to the basement to look for the
extra one. He frowned at her, annoyed. Vic was right in the middle of a story about
some drunks who’d gotten on his bus earlier in the evening, and George didn’t
want to miss the funny part. Regina put her hands on her hips and narrowed her
eyes at him and he decided it would be easier to just go ahead and get the damn
punchbowl.

He was still searching for it when Chuck came down the
basement stairs. “I was wondering where you disappeared to,” Chuck said.

“Enjoying the party?” George asked him.

Chuck sat down
on the bottom step and took a sip of his drink, looking pensive.

“You alright?”
George asked.

Chuck shrugged.
“I don’t know if I am.”

George went and
sat beside him on the step. He knew from years of friendship with Chuck that if
he just waited, he’d talk.

After a few
seconds, Chuck said, “Things aint too good with me and Lena.”

“Still?”

“
We been
talking about splitting up.”

“Every marriage
got problems,” said George. “Y’all can work it out.”

“Lena
don’t
know if she want to work it out.”

George couldn’t
believe it. He couldn’t imagine
Lena
wanting to leave
Chuck
. Surely, she
didn’t think she could do better. Lena was the least engaging person he had
ever known. She never talked about anything interesting, never even seemed to
know what was going on. Anytime someone mentioned something that was happening
in the news, like the lunch-counter sit-ins down south, which everyone seemed
to have something to say about, Lena just smiled and nodded along, never saying
what she thought, and George had decided she didn’t think anything at all. For
the life of him, he could not understand how it was that Chuck could be married
to her. Even when he tried his hardest, when he tried to see one thing about
her that was special, one thing that might have caught Chuck’s eye, one little,
tiny thing, he couldn’t. Once he had asked Chuck how he and Lena had met,
thinking perhaps there was some great romantic story that connected them, but
Chuck told him they’d met at church, after Sunday service a few weeks before
Easter in 1944.
A few weeks before Easter.
Not even
on
Easter, for goodness sake. And after
asking Chuck several times what in the world he saw in that woman, phrasing it
in less insulting ways than that, such as, “what’s your favorite thing about
Lena?” and “when did you know she was the one for you?” and getting answers
like, “oh, she’s real fun to play cards with,” and “I don’t remember exactly,
why you asking?” George had given up, deciding it was one of those things he
just wasn’t meant to understand, like algebra.

“You ever think
about leaving?” Chuck asked him now.

“No,” George
said.

Chuck looked a
little surprised by his answer.

“Well, not
really,” George said. “Not seriously.”

There were times when he thought about it. He
certainly wasn’t happy in his marriage. But it didn’t really bother him much,
because he had never been happy, not in all his life that he could remember,
and he didn’t imagine that he ever would be. The idea of being without Regina
and his children didn’t make him feel any happier, only strange and lost, and
he couldn’t imagine what his life would be like without them, a thirty-five
year-old man with no family. It wasn’t normal. It wouldn’t look right.

“Well, I thought about it,” Chuck said. “A lot. And
now Lena thinking about it.” He took a long drink off his whiskey,
then
looked at George. “You a good friend to me. Since my
daddy died, you the only person I feel like I can count on.”

George nodded, but could think of nothing to say.

Chuck reached out and put his hand on George’s knee.
George felt something surge up from within him, something urgent, and his heart
began to beat fast, and so loudly he was sure it echoed in the quiet basement.
Chuck stared into George’s face, not saying anything. George put his hand on
the back of Chuck’s head and pulled him closer, and kissed his mouth. As soon
as their lips met, Chuck pulled back, pushing George away with both hands,
splashing whiskey from his glass onto George’s shirt, scrambling up off the
step.

Wiping his
mouth, Chuck said, “Don’t do that.” His face and voice were full of disgust.

George felt a
rush of heat from his chest up his throat and into his face. He stood up,
wringing his hands, not looking at Chuck but at the floor. “I’m sorry,” he
whispered. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I aint like
that, George.”

“Me, neither. I
aint like that, I just thought—”

“Thought what?”

George just shook his head. He couldn’t imagine now
what he had thought. Still not looking at Chuck, he turned and walked quickly
up the steps, out of the basement, and back to the party.

1976

G
eorge lay naked
on a couch with faded stripes and stared up at a bare light bulb that hung from
the ceiling directly above. Beside him, pressed against him, another man, whose
nickname was Butch, lay on his side, wearing only a white undershirt, naked
from the waist down, the sound of his snoring the only sound in the room.

It was near
eleven at night and George had been there since ten. He had left home after
dinner and met up with Butch at a bar they frequented over on Market Street.
After a few beers and another few whiskeys, they had come back to Butch’s
house, and come down into the basement, where Butch’s wife and children, who
were sleeping upstairs, would not hear them. They had stripped each other naked
and rolled around a little on the couch before Butch, having drank too much
again, passed out. George had lain there, hoping he would wake up so they could
do what they had come there to do. He didn’t like just lying there with another
man, even Butch, who he had known for years and liked.

They had been
friends when they were both deacons at Blessed Chapel Church of God. Butch,
whose real name was William Brooks, still was one. They had not been lovers
when they had known each other back then. It was years later, in 1959, on his
first visit to the bar they now frequented, that George had seen Deacon Brooks
there. George had moved through the crowd of twenty or thirty men. A few of
them had smiled at him as he passed. When he got to the bar, the bartender, who
was
high-yellow
and bearded, looked him over, a hint
of amusement on his lips.

"Where you
come from?" he asked.

"Georgia,"
George had said.

The bartender
laughed. "I mean what you doing in here? You know where you at?"

"I know
where I'm at," George said. "I'm on one side of a bar and you on the
other. I guess that make you the bartender, don't it? So, you gone pour me a
drink or just stand there grinning?"

"Alright,
man, I aint mean no harm. What you drinking?"

"Whiskey.
Whatever you got that's good."

There were no
empty barstools, so he stood there, with his head down, not wanting to look
around, not wanting people to see him, wondering what the hell he
was
doing there, what the hell he was
looking for in that place. He only knew about the bar because he had overheard
two men whispering about it on the el one evening on his way home from work. A
few nights later, he'd left the house after dinner, without any of his family
either noticing or caring. The bar was only a few blocks away from his house,
so he'd walked to it. In fact, he'd walked past it. Too nervous to go inside,
he'd circled the block three times before finally pulling open the plain brown
door

and
entering. It was a small room with red lampshades and
worn carpet on the floor.

The bartender had put his whiskey down on the bar, and
George had drunk half of it in one gulp, closing his eyes for a moment at the
sting in his throat. When he opened them again, Deacon Brooks was standing a
few feet away from him, engaged in conversation with another man.

George's first thought was to leave the bar
immediately, go straight to Pastor Goode and expose Butch. But that might have
meant exposing himself, too. So, he had decided just to leave, hurry out before
he was spotted. But in his scramble to pay the bartender he’d dropped some
change on the bar and the noise caught Deacon Brooks’ attention. He’d come
right over to George, stood there looking at him, neither of them saying a
word. George thought about punching him in the face, damning him for being part
of that church that had rejected him after he had given so much. Standing there
looking at Deacon Brooks, he saw Pastor Goode and the rest of the congregation,
saw their betrayal, and he wanted to lash out.

“You want to go
somewhere?” Deacon Brooks had asked.

George blinked.
“What?”

He moved closer,
put his hand on George’s hip. “I know somewhere we can go.”

While they
fucked, George thought of Pastor Goode and the rest of those hypocrites, and
thrust harder, and when he came it was with a feeling of power. Seconds later,
though, that feeling was replaced by a deep loathing, not of that church or its
parishioners or pastor, but of himself. He’d pulled up his pants and left
without a word, without ever looking at Deacon Brooks, only hearing him say,
“Don’t go,” as George walked back up the basement steps.

He had returned,
though, and frequently, over the seventeen years that had followed.

Lying there next to Butch now, staring up at the harsh
light bulb, George felt restless. He elbowed Butch in the back. “I’m leaving,”
he said.

Butch did not stir.

George got
dressed and left.

Walking down
Spruce Street, he heard footsteps behind him, and when he turned to look he saw
a shadow move between two parked cars. When he passed the same man digging
through the same trash bin as he had a couple of nights before, the man
grinned, holding his arms out. “Son! It’s me! Come on give your daddy a kiss!”

***

The next morning, Ava awoke to a familiar song of
summer: the melodic whirring of a box fan. She half-opened her eyes and saw it
sitting in the open window of her bedroom, the early morning light that
streamed through it being cut over and over by its metal blades in such quick
rotation that the light appeared undisturbed except for a faint trembling. She
lay there in her bed, held in half-consciousness by the lull of the fan, and
tried to recall the dream she’d been having, parts of which still clung,
sticky, to the edges of her brain.
A
dodgeball
game.
A fat, red, dimpled ball, almost spongy in its texture, almost
juicy in its bounce.
The closeness of friends.
And the threat of older girls and boys who could not resist the
urge to use the ball as a weapon, to try and hurt as many people as they could.
She tried to remember the details of the dreamed game,
the
who
and when, but they slipped through her waking-up mind like water
through a colander. Uncatchable.

By the time she
got downstairs, everyone had gone to work, and Helena was the only one left in
the house. Ava found her in the kitchen, rummaging around under the sink. “I’m
looking for tools,” she said, when she saw Ava.

“Tools?”

She nodded. “A
hammer. Some nails.”

Ava crossed to
the sink, opened one of the lower cabinet drawers, and pulled out a
tool box
. She sat it down on the floor between Helena and herself,
took out a hammer and a box of nails and held them up.

“Excellent,”
Helena said, taking them. “I thought I’d repair some of the loose floorboards
in Sarah’s bedroom. I was worried I was keeping everyone up last night with my
pacing.”

“I doubt it,”
Ava said. “We’re used to creaking floors around here.”

“Well, it’ll
make me feel better anyway.” She stood up and headed for the door.

“I’ll help you,”
Ava said, grabbing a second hammer from the toolbox.

There was a
moment of hesitation, only a moment, Ava was sure of that, but it hung there
between them, weighty as a half a minute. Then Helena said, “Alright.”

They worked from
opposite sides of the room, the banging of their hammers filling up the nervous
quiet. Every few minutes, Ava glanced over at Helena and tried to think of
something to say as they slowly made their way towards each other at the center
of the room.

“You’re a good cook.”

Helena looked over at her.

“Those crab legs were really good. I’m surprised
you’re not married. Doesn’t every man want a wife who can cook?”

Helena laughed.
“I’m not sure I can say what every man wants.” She took another nail from the
box and eyed the next floorboard.

“Why aren’t you
married?” Ava asked her. “I mean
,
do you want to be?”

She shook her
head. “No. I don’t.”

“Why not?” Ava
knew several women Helena’s age who were not married, but all of them talked
about how much they wanted to be. “You’re not one of those women’s lib types,
are you?”

“Not really. That
movement’s not really about us, is it?”

Ava had no idea
what that movement was really about. She tested the soundness of another
floorboard, leaning her palm against it and pressing her weight onto it. It
squeaked loudly beneath her.

“I guess I just like
my freedom too much,” Helena said.

Ava hesitated.
She wanted to know about Helena’s life. She felt she needed to understand
everything about her, so that she could discover the one thing that was causing
all these changes in her, but she didn’t want to push too hard, to pry. “Tell
me about the last person you were with.”

“Why?”

Ava shrugged. “I’m
curious.”

Helena laughed.
“Alright. The last man I was with was a science teacher at my school.”

“What was his
name?” Ava asked.

“Frederick.”

“Frederick.
The science teacher.
My. He sounds…interesting.”

Helena laughed. “Well,
he was a little nerdy, I guess.”

“So, then you
like teacher types?”

“I think I like
different things in different people.”

“But you didn’t
want to marry him? Frederick?”

Helena shook her
head. “Not even a little bit,” she said, and they both laughed.

Later that afternoon, they walked over to Sixtieth
Street, so Ava could purchase a new pair of shoes for work. The neighborhood
was humming with activity, the traffic heavy, buses and cars and people moving
in a steady stream down the narrow blocks. The shoe store was air-conditioned,
and Ava and Helena lingered inside longer than necessary, trying on shoes they
didn’t intend to buy. Helena put on a pair of red heels and sat with her legs
crossed and her head thrown back, like a picture in a fashion magazine, and Ava
laughed, while the salespeople whispered to each other and threw Helena
distasteful glances.

On their way back home, Helena asked, “What about you,
Ava? Why did you get married?”

“That’s what
people do,” Ava said.

“But what was it
that first attracted you to Paul?”

Ava thought
about it. “He was there.”

Helena looked at her, her head tilted to one side.

“What I mean,” Ava said, “is that he was always
there
. He came into the cafeteria where
I work three or four times a day. Half the time, he didn’t even eat anything. He
just sat there in the corner, smiling at me. He did it for months, I
guess—that’s what he told me later—but I didn’t even notice he was
there for the first half of it.”

Helena looked surprised. “He must be a very patient
man, my brother. He wasn’t that way when we were young.”

“Tell me about when you were kids. Paul doesn’t talk a
lot about it.”

“I don’t blame him,” Helena said. “There’s not a lot
of good to say.”

They walked past a small store, out of which the aroma
of fried food wafted, and two young men standing outside it watched them as
they passed, their wide eyes fixed on Helena, as if they’d never seen anything
like her.

“We had it pretty rough,” Helena continued, either
ignoring or not noticing the stares. “Our father wasn’t around much. He’d show
up once every couple of years and talk like he loved us and wanted to be with
us, and he’d take us camping or skating or something, and then he’d disappear
again.”

“That must have been hard for you.”

“Yes. For Paul, too.”

“What about your mother? Paul told me she drank.”

“Oh, she drank, alright.
Like a
fish, as they say.
She drank herself to death, as a matter of fact. Very
slowly, though, so she still had plenty of time to fuck up her children.”

“How did she fuck you up?” Ava asked.

“She was not kind to us,” Helena said, “after she
started drinking. She yelled a lot. Constantly. She berated us, told us it was
our fault that our father didn’t want to live with us. She told me it was my
fault, because I was so black. She beat us. Luckily, she was so drunk so much
of the time that we could outsmart her and get away before it got too bad. Sometimes.
Other times…” Her voice trailed off.

What Ava wanted to know, what she had really been
asking, was in what way Helena had turned out fucked up, what was fucked up
about her.

“I clung to my brother,” Helena was saying, “and he
clung to me.”

“It’s good you had each other,” Ava said.

They were coming up to the corner of her block,
passing by the church, and Ava suddenly remembered something. Herself, as a
girl, standing in front of the church, with her brother. They were holding
hands. Another girl stood before them, a big girl with a mean face, and she was
angry, and her hands were balled into fists. Geo was scared. Ava could feel his
hand trembling inside hers. She was entirely unafraid herself, though, even as
the girl raised her fist. She saw Pastor Goode standing on the church steps.
She peered at him, unsure whether he was part of the memory, watching the three
kids but not intervening, or if he was really there, watching her walking by with
Helena.

“Do you see him?” Ava asked Helena. “Pastor Goode? Do
you see him there?”

Helena looked over at the church, then back at Ava.
“Yes, I see him.”

Ava nodded.

“What’s wrong?” Helena asked.

“Nothing,” Ava said. “Let’s just get home.”

Neither George nor Paul was home that evening, so it
was just the four women together again. After dinner, they sat in the living
room watching
The Flip Wilson Show
.
At the first commercial break, Helena excused herself and went to smoke a
cigarette. Halfway through the show, when she had not returned, Ava went to
find her.

It was a warm
night and there was barely a breeze. Helena sat on the top step, her back
against the splintered wood railing. When Ava came out of the house, Helena
said, “I know Paul probably asked you to look after me, Ava, but you really
don’t have to.”

Ava sat down.
“Don’t you like Flip Wilson?”

“Yes, I do. I
was actually thinking of one of my students. He used to do impressions of all
Flip’s characters. He’d come in the next morning talking like Reverend Leroy or
Geraldine.” She laughed.

“It sounds like
you loved your job,” Ava said. “Why’d you leave?”

She sighed. “It
was time to move on.”

“What does that mean?”

Helena laughed.
“I don’t know. It’s the only thing I can ever think of to say. I was fired.”

“Oh!”

“You’re the
first person I’ve said that out loud to,” she said. “You won’t tell Paul, will
you?”

“No.”

Helena looked at
her, expectantly. “Are you going to ask me why I got fired?”

Ava shook her
head. “No. But if you want to tell me, you’re welcome to.”

There was the
sound of a door opening and they both turned and watched a middle-aged woman
coming out of the back door of the house to the right of them. She was carrying
a bag of trash, which she put into a can beside her back porch. When she looked
over and saw Ava and Helena on the
Delaneys
’ steps,
she frowned and shook her head dramatically, before going back inside.

“That’s Sister
Hattie,” Ava said. “She used to be our Sunday school teacher.”

Helena frowned. “Isn’t it strange living around these
people and being so cut off from them at the same time?”

Ava didn’t want
to say that she hadn’t really thought much about it, though that was the truth,
because she didn’t want Helena to give her the same look she had given her when
she said she hadn’t thought about Paul’s feelings regarding children. So,
instead, she said what she thought about it right then. “Yes, it is.”

“Are you and
Paul really going to move?” Helena asked her.

“I’m not,” Ava
said.

“Does Paul know
that?”

“I’ve told him a
hundred times.”

“And why won’t
you?” Helena asked.

“I can’t. It’s
just not something I’m able to do.”

Helena sighed. “What
happened to your brother, Ava?” she asked, the question coming out slow and
cautious. “Do you mind my asking? Are you able to talk about it?”

“I don’t know,”
Ava said. “I’ve never tried. I’ve never had a reason to.”

“Not to your
family?”

“Well, they were
there. They know what happened.”

“What about
Paul?” she asked. “You must have told him about it.”

“I didn’t have
to. Pastor Goode did it for me. I’m sure he thought it would run Paul off.”

“In four years
of marriage, you’ve never discussed it?”

“Not really.”

Helena looked
perplexed. She studied Ava’s face for a long moment,
then
said, “Well, if you want to tell me, you’re welcome to.”

She smiled and Ava smiled back.

The back door
opened and Sarah came out of the house. “Y’all missed it,” she said. “He did
Geraldine.”

“Is it nine
already?” Ava asked.

“
Mmm
hmm.”

“It’s my fault,”
Helena said. “Ava was just trying to keep me company out of a feeling of
obligation and I talked so much she missed Geraldine.” She shrugged. “Come have
a cigarette, Sarah.”

“I don’t want to
interrupt,” Sarah said, already coming out onto the porch. She took the
cigarette that was offered and sat down between Helena and Ava on the step.
“What
was
y’all talking about?”

“What were we
talking about, Ava?” Helena asked.

“Not talking
about things.”

“That’s right.
Is there anything,” she asked Sarah, “you’d like to not talk to us about?”