What Brings You Back Home
by Michelle Richmond
West Mobile
What brings you back home? people want to know.
“Work,” she replies.
The assumption is that she has returned for a certain kind of work, as innocuous as it is forgettable. She’s in marketing, right? Or is it advertising? One or the other. For some big tech company in California. Married to a guy from San Francisco. She doesn’t come home much, hasn’t since she met the guy. That was probably fifteen, sixteen years ago. She loves it out there, despite the fires and the earthquakes.
Only after she is gone, after the puzzle pieces have fit together, will someone say, “Who knew?”
Well, she knew. She’s not one to make it up as she goes along.
Driving through West Mobile on her way from the airport, she sees a subdivision where the pecan grove used to be. The subdivision isn’t new, but it’s new to her. It looks like it sprung up in the early aughts, one of a few dozen such subdivisions that rose from bare ground, each with a name splashed in cursive across a grand entrance. The entrances were usually made of brick, often whitewashed. For some reason, the developers in those decades gravitated toward the word plantation, as though it were aspirational rather than shameful, a word without a history. This one is called Plantation Estates. The whitewash has faded, leaving the bricks a muddy shade of gray. Someone has done a nice job with the landscaping, though, a wild tangle of hot-pink azaleas blotting out the first four letters, so that the sign reads, tation Estates.
Meditation Estates, she thinks.
Invitation.
Rumination.
Adaptation.
Lamentation Estates.
Ha! That’s it. She likes the sound of it: Lamentation Estates.
The subdivisions spread west toward the airport starting in the eighties and on through the nineties and beyond, out across the pecan groves and pastures. The subdivisions were once populated by people who liked their houses clean and new, who thought “previously owned” was a kind of a curse, people who didn’t appreciate the charm of the old homes on Dauphin Street, who didn’t like what was going on downtown. Now the city is booming, and people from all over move to Mobile without a history, not knowing West Mobile from Dauphin Street, picking houses online, surprised by how cheap they are, in comparison, but surprised they’re not even cheaper, because, after all, it’s Alabama. Not that long ago, four hundred grand would get you a mansion in Mobile. Now it just gets you a pretty nice house.
Like the other subdivisions along this flat stretch of green, the luster has worn off of Plantation Estates. The community pool has gone mossy. The tennis courts are unkempt. The houses weren’t built to last, and it shows. People love it here anyway, their own hot, humid slice of the Southern dream. Which is different from the run-of-the-mill American dream, by the way: friendlier, and with more mayonnaise. Besides, who needs a community pool when you have a better one in your backyard?
At the ass end of the seventies, her parents bought ten acres of land where Plantation Estates now stands. Her mother’s get-rich-slow scheme involved pecan trees. She and her sisters spent one sweltering summer on what her mother called the land, plucking pecans out of the dirt where they landed, collecting the hard brown shells in black garbage bags, which they transported in the family station wagon to a nut-processing facility way out I-65. It took about two hours to fill a garbage bag, and she and her sisters each earned $2.50 per bag. She doesn’t know what the real profit margin was — whether her mother pocketed ten cents per bag or ten dollars. She doesn’t know if her mother was subsidizing her and her sisters, or if she and her sisters were subsidizing her mother.
She remembers it as a summer of sunburns, raw fingers, and high hopes. At some point the family abruptly stopped going to the land. She doesn’t know what happened. She doesn’t know if they sold it, or if they lost it — her family seemed to always be losing things in those days — or if they never really had it. Maybe they made a down payment on the land, and that was it. Maybe it was done with a wink and a handshake, and the raw deal was so embarrassing in hindsight that her parents never mentioned it. They were, by all accounts, a sweep-it-under-the-rug kind of family.
How perfect is it that her target lives in that subdivision? Not in the biggest house, but in the second-biggest. On a quadruple lot, no neighbors on either side or behind, because he likes the privacy, and he can afford it. He bought the house when his boys were still small, when the subdivision was still going up.
The five-star hotel downtown is a real five stars. Everything is sparkling clean. The handsome concierge is sporting a rainbow tie, and even though he can’t be a day over thirty, he speaks in the gentrified way of old Southern queens, who owned gay before it was acceptable in these parts, but often married women anyway, for the sake of their genteel mothers. Maybe Mobile has changed, a little.
A woman in a pastel-blue sundress presents her with a mimosa upon arrival, which is nice, then a second mimosa after she finishes the first, which is exceptional.
She holds her breath when the porter takes her bags, but figures it would arouse suspicion if she tries to take them herself. Anyway, she doesn’t want the staff to think she’s not a tipper. It’s always like this: she doesn’t mind tipping, but she hates having someone carry her bags. It makes her feel colonial. When you come from poor, poor is always in your head, and there’s a part of you that imagines your own grandfather carrying some guy’s bags, calling a stranger “sir.” Her grandparents were sharecroppers, traveling from farm to farm in Louisiana and Mississippi, picking whatever needed to be picked, mostly cotton, their pale Irish skin blistering until it peeled. Coming from what was once known, unsympathetically, as “poor white trash,” she’ll never not feel like an impostor at a five-star hotel, although she sure as hell prefers them to the Motel 6.
“Your granddaddy put himself through college washing other boys’ laundry,” her mother has said a thousand times. She thinks of it every time she takes her clothes to the dry cleaner, and it’s her familial guilt that makes her keep her mouth shut every time a silk blouse comes back ruined or a cashmere sweater doesn’t come back at all. Every time she feels like complaining to the dry cleaner, she imagines her grandfather hand-washing laundry in the middle of the night, toiling for the future of the family, and that shuts her right up, even though she never met him because he died before she was born, and anyway, her aunt has always disputed that story about the laundry. Her mother has never been the most reliable narrator of their family’s history.
In her room, after the porter leaves, she takes off her shoes and jeans and lies on the cool white bed in her T-shirt, enjoying the chemical chill of the air conditioner. After a while she gets up and showers. The bathroom smells like gardenias, and not just because of the soap. There are actual gardenias, fresh-cut, arranged in a mason jar. A nice touch — the mason jar — as if someone at the hotel has been watching Chip and Joanna on TV and wants to bring a touch of casual Southern charm to the five-star experience. She has always loved the sickly sweet scent of gardenias, though the opaque, velvet whiteness of the flowers strikes her as funereal.
It’s half past nine in the evening when she gets out of the shower. She slathers on the hotel lotion, dresses in skinny jeans, sneakers, a long, flowy silk blouse, blow-dries her hair, puts on more makeup than usual but less than the mimosa lady. Her husband always joked that “the natural look” took an hour to achieve and looked about as natural as a dog in flip-flops.