The hallway is silent now. The couple next door quiet. The garlic smell has lessened. Through my window I hear, from the church down the block, foot stomping, a ratchety organ. I set the cloth aside, with its impure stain. Walk to the window. Cats prowl the freight yard below. Birdshit paints the phone booth. Dazed, still — caught between Sarah’s time and my own — I sit on the sill, listening to Praise Jesus. Dirt rings the windowframe. Houston’s skin. Barbara would lap it up. Thinking of her, I run my finger through the grime, lift it to my lips.
Three A.M. I get up to pee. The smudge around my mouth is like the margarita salt I remember feeling with my tongue, the night of my date with Dwayne. Dirt from the windowsill. I’m going nuts. The heat. No sex.
Don’t start, T. Besides, I was already restless. I felt this way right after Dwayne, after Mama died, before driving here to Freedmen’s Town — as if a lock on a box had been broken and I couldn’t keep the lid on any longer, holding myself inside. Who I was kept drifting away, like smoke from dry ice, and others kept floating into the space, filling the box with their presences. Is this what intimacy is like? Am I simply not used to it? The fear I felt with Dwayne — is that what it means to really give to a man? Mama’s sickness and death … if you love, you’ll grieve. No avoiding it.
I wash my face. As my hands rub my lips, I drift once more, and for a moment I’m a girl again in Bitter’s house, bent above a rusty-drained sink. Mama’s hands flit behind my ears, across my eyes and nose, dribbling warm water down the bones of my neck and into my filthy shirt-front. “Child, child, you have such gorgeous skin.” Through the open bathroom window, trilling frogs. “Why do you want to cover it up with all this nasty bayou dirt?”
The plumbing shudders. I shut off the water. Mama’s words were often harsh, admonishing me to straighten up, behave a certain way, be careful … but her touch was gentle. Early on, in Houston, she was a lovely, conscientious caretaker. After we moved to Dallas, I don’t remember her ever touching me: another reason, I realize now, I’ve longed for the bayou heat. It was inseparable for me from the warmth of Mama’s arms, the safety of her nearness.
When my turn came, I made a poor caretaker, working late, spending little time in the house (am I doing this again, now, with Bitter?) … but in part, it’s because Mama kept me distant. Dale, so upbeat all the time despite her loss of strength, Mama stoic, silent. She gave herself over to the cancer as easily and completely as she’d surrendered to the ‘burbs. I’d drop by after dark, find her asleep on the bed we’d set up in the living room so she could watch TV. Dale would be upstairs, showering, humming to himself. He always left a little supper for me, warming in the oven. A lamb chop. Roast beef. In the television’s gray-blue light, Mama’s face looked as gaunt as a prisoner of war’s. Studying her each night in her final days — when she was more removed from me than ever — I thought of the stories I’d read in history classes about captured soldiers or kidnap victims: how utterly dependent they were on their captors, how the guards were forced to become caretakers. Sometimes, a prisoner would be so overwhelmed by the bitter nature of this relationship, he’d take on his captor’s behaviors and beliefs: Patty Hearst robbing banks. One of my books said, The recognition of complete dependency on an unreliable caretaker is too terrible to bear.
And what if that caretaker is your neighborhood, your country, everything you see and hear? For the folks here in Freedmen’s Town, Houston is an unpredictable benefactor, ready to turn on you any minute. The price of the slightest misstep, the mildest error, is high. So what do you do? Assume your caretaker’s skin, if you can. Mama ran to where no one knew her and turned herself over to — turned herself into — the enemy.
But those nights in the makeshift bed, in front of the TV talk shows, she showed her true self to me as I gnoshed my lukewarm supper … only, till just this moment, I didn’t quite put it all together. Her mask fell away, eaten by her illness, and the prisoner emerged, barely breathing … the dry husk of a woman who once sewed the old slave patterns, who’d named her girl Telisha. At some point, before the trauma of uncertainty split her, she celebrated where she’d come from. This was the mother I never knew, but she was there, somewhere, buried deep inside the plush white suburb that whispered and hissed each night with the sound of automatic sprinklers.
Funny. I remember a recurring dream I had in my teens, as my curtains rustled and the sprinklers sighed at night: I was crawling through Dale’s house, among splintered tables and chairs. Whenever I told her about this, Mama just pursed her lips. She wouldn’t answer when I asked, “What do you think it means?”
I’ve never put much stock in dreams, but lately, hearing her voice in my sleep, imagining her fears, I think: naturally, trauma resists neat forms. It defies being packaged as a story. The pain is so huge, we want to lock our splinters away in a box. But sometimes the heat of memory sets off a spark, and the box starts to burst.
Mama — without a story from you, how was I supposed to contain my imagination? What else would it clutch at but the crumbles of your mask? With only broken bits and no list for piecing them back together, what could I make of my life?
I stand at the window now, looking out on the Bayou City, listening to the frogs. Why did I come here? Because Mama didn’t want me back in Freedmen’s Town. She didn’t want her trauma passed to me (but, of course, her trauma was all she had to give; every stitch of her energy went into fighting it, denying it, and day in, day out I absorbed her intensity). She didn’t want me to find the cause of her splintering. What was it? Lack of money? Shit jobs? My daddy? What tool did he split her with — as if I didn’t know? The cocky world of men (I’m a caretaker, know’m say’n)?. Well, here I am, Mama, right where you didn’t want me to be. You want me out? Come and get me, then. You’ll have to come and get me.
15
MENTALLY, I check my questions for Ariyeh. Forget my reasons for returning to Houston. What would you do now, if you were me? Ignore the impulse to ditch Dallas and settle here now that I’ve found you and Bitter again? Ignore my “family” ties — and my concerns for Bitter’s health — and resume my safe and steady job? Or burn it all down, start fresh somewhere else?
We’ve got to deal with Bitter, and soon. Since Grady’s death he’s moped around, frailer than ever — and just as stubborn about his gris-gris.
She suggested I meet her at school. She’d only have forty minutes for lunch. When I arrive, children are running through the courtyard, tossing gooey pizza into trash cans. Teachers herd them into the building. Two cops in creaking leather coats stand outside the office speaking softly to a group of women. I find Ariyeh inside in a classroom whose floor tiles have peeled and curled in the heat. The fluorescent light hums like a kazoo. In a corner, a gerbil snuffles among pine shavings in a wire cage; the room smells of its flat, bleachy urine, of Kool-Aid and bologna.
Ariyeh tells me two students, nine-year-old boys, were discovered dead this morning in a Dumpster a block away from school. On an anonymous tip, police arrested a black man seen running from the site just after dawn. “They’re saying it’s Johnson.”