Strangers at the Feast (23 page)

Denise had an indisputable frontier toughness, like those eighteenth-century women who ran taverns and brothels. Women who kept revolvers under their petticoats.

“Still liking the job at the school?” Ginny asked.

Denise looked caught off guard, but her face quickly leapt into a cheerleader’s grin. She shook her fist. “Gotta keep kids healthy!”

Denise had worked as a nutritionist in the public schools for five years.

“Oh, Ginny, don’t make her talk about work on a holiday.”

“Some people like work, Mom.”

Their voices reverberated off the granite countertops. Denise grabbed a knife and guillotined a Macintosh apple, slicing it with frightening speed. Ginny flipped on the coffeemaker, then stirred the gravy on the stove. On the neighboring burner sat a pot of mashed yams, drizzled with butter and nutmeg.

What tuber, Ginny loved to ask her students on the first day of class, forever changed the lives of women?

Yams! she chided, when no one answered. The source of the birth control pill!

Ginny glanced at Denise, amazed that after all these years, with all her mother’s prying, with Denise’s constant emphasis on the need for planning and preparation, that no one had brought up the fact that the pill is 99 percent effective. Apparently not so for the unwed Denise. Accident? Sure, Ginny thought when she had heard the news.

But her brother squealed so happily over the phone. He had called her first. “Gin, you’ll never believe… I’m gonna be a father!”

Maybe Douglas wanted to settle down and needed a woman to trick him. He wouldn’t have been the first man in history.

Within a year, he went from being Ginny’s big brother to being a husband and father. All his overprotectiveness was channeled elsewhere. Occasionally, when she felt she’d lost him forever, Ginny was tempted to confide her suspicion. But having spent so many years studying the obstacles against women, Ginny just couldn’t betray another woman’s deception.

“And with Priya?” With one clean sweep of the knife, Denise exiled the apple peels to the trash. “Will you keep up teaching full-time?”

Ginny had spent the bulk of her savings on securing Priya’s guardianship and buying the house. There weren’t many options.

“Even if it means fewer hours with her per week, I think I’ll be a better parent if I’m working. I’ll find a nanny or something. I’ll need help.”

Her mother had been watching her intently while garnishing the cranberry sauce with a band of almond slivers. “Ginny, what do you hear from David Eisenberg these days?”

“David Eisenberg? Mom, we dated for three weeks.” Her mother had become fixated on a veterinarian she had dated four years earlier. Ginny was not going to spend the afternoon discussing her romantic life. “A quick catnap would really do me wonders.” She feigned a yawn.

“You just had coffee!” exclaimed her mother.

“Mom, listen. I have a daughter now. She’s in the next room. I’m not interested in dating.”

“Men like children,” she said. “And they like women with maternal instincts.”

Ginny crossed her arms, trying to contain herself.

“Eleanor, that bowl looks splendid,” Denise said, giving Ginny a wink. “Would you mind putting it on the table?”

KIJO

Kijo could tell when an auntie was about to leave because late at night Grandma Rose would sit in the kitchen, her fingers punching calculator keys, figuring out how much she could tuck away in another certificate of deposit.

“You know where I been?” she’d say the next day. “At the bank, opening myself another CD.” She wore a fancy blue skirt and jacket, sprayed her pink hair into a shiny helmet. “All I need is my CDs, my house. Ain’t no one can take that away from you. People come and go, Kijo. But I got this house. And I done near fought a war for it.”

This was how his grandmother referred to her fight to save the neighborhood: her
war
. Around the time her parents moved to Freedom Avenue, the state built public-housing towers nearby. Soon the quiet streets where she and her brothers played as children were spotted with young men selling drugs, teenage girls selling tricks. With each year that passed, the area grew more perilous, and by the time Kijo was born, his own mother disappeared into the shadowy danger of the South End. Kijo could remember lying in bed at night watching his wall for the red flash of police cars. When she left the house, Grandma Rose slipped pinking shears into her purse.

Having lost her husband and her daughter, Grandma Rose wasn’t going to lose her house. She organized a neighborhood association and held meetings in the local church and at night she and Auntie Henrietta fastened on orange pinnies, took to the streets
with bullhorns and flashlights. In dozens of letters to city hall she complained about crime and filth at the housing towers. She included Polaroids. Eventually, the kids who already mocked Kijo for his stutter started calling out, “How’s Grandma Rose Hell?”

“Grandma, why you gotta make so much noise about all this?”

“You embarrassed I’m fighting for what’s right? I should let these hoodlums take over our street ’cause you don’t want me being a nuisance? I never knew I’d raised a yellowbelly.”

And she won her war. Eventually the state tore down Southfield Village and in its place built town houses with gardens. White families and Asian families moved in. Streetlights and planter boxes with daffodils appeared.

“Kijo, you think I shoulda just kept quiet?” Grandma Rose asked. “Look around, boy. This here is the reward for working hard and protecting what we got.”

Kijo spent his childhood in that house. He knew how the third step whined under the weight of his sneakers; how his bedroom window stayed open only with a phone book propped under it; how the rain sounded best in the kitchen. He knew the location of the jar of pennies he’d buried when he was six. He knew the closet door where Grandma Rose had marked his height until he was fourteen, when at six feet tall he was getting “scary” big, tall enough to quit measuring.

A year after that, the men in gray suits drove up and said the house was a slum, that Kijo and his grandma had to get moving.

They carried stacks of papers. They had photographs of overflowing trash cans, rotten porch planks, wasps’ nests in the eaves.

As the neighborhood had improved, property taxes rose, and Grandma Rose began selling off CDs to make the payments. This left little money for upkeep on the house.

“I’m the founder of the neighborhood association,” Grandma Rose told the men. “I cleaned up the slum that was here with my very own
broom. Four generations of my family have lived in this house. Thank you very much, but we’re staying put.”

But the men were offering good money. People down the street sold and Kijo didn’t understand why she wouldn’t budge. She told Kijo that if you let people push you out of their way, it wouldn’t ever stop.

Kijo knocked wasps’ nests loose. He carried the trash all the way to the dumpster. But then the city itself said they had to move.

“Now it’s the government saying so,” Kijo tried to soothe her.

“Pontius Pilate,” Grandma Rose said. “Just because they’re officials, you think that makes it right?”

Grandma Rose put on her bank outfit and dragged Kijo to the office of the Redevelopment Commission. She hugged a scrapbook with family photos and newspaper clippings of her father coming back from the war in Europe. She had an envelope full of receipts from her oil and electric and water bills, showing she’d always paid promptly.

She had sewn Kijo a special suit, which made his legs itch as they sat in the small waiting room for almost three hours. On a table lay all sorts of newspapers,
Time
magazine,
BusinessWeek
. Kijo lifted
Fortune,
flipped through a few pages, but set it back down when he caught the receptionist smiling. Every half hour Grandma Rose jabbed her cane at the woman’s desk.

“We didn’t come here to breathe up all the air in the waiting room.”

The receptionist would then apologize, offer them sodas, and insist that someone would soon be with them. When Kijo got up to use the bathroom, on his way out he saw a group of men standing by the elevator. He recognized one—the man had come by the house to talk with Grandma Rose several times. Kijo knew he should say something, knew that these were the men his grandmother had come to talk to, but he felt awkward in his suit, awkward in the building. One by one, the men turned to look at him. Kijo felt his tongue go
thick in his mouth and he looked down at his own feet. When they all filed into the elevator, he heard a voice say, “Clean getaway.”

Kijo sat back down beside his grandmother and said nothing. Finally a blond girl no older than Kijo led them into an empty conference room.

Before sitting, Grandma Rose asked, “May I ask your position, miss?”

“The commissioners asked me to take all your statements for our records.”

“But you are clearly not on the commission.”

“I have twenty minutes. Please.”

The girl set a cell phone on the table and throughout the meeting, she flipped it open and closed. As Grandma Rose explained how she bought the house with the army-insurance payout, the girl nodded and took notes, trying hard to look interested, making a sympathetic cluck from time to time. But Kijo could see that she had slipped off her flip-flops and tucked her feet under her skirt. She swung her chair ever so slightly from side to side. Grandma Rose was pleading, and Kijo could see it was going nowhere.

He was angry with himself for his silence by the elevator. Finally, he burst out, “Miss, you got a home of your own?”

He could see her blue eyes take in the blackness of his skin, the bulk of his hands—and now the depth and anger of his voice. She slipped on her flip-flops, sat up straight in her chair, closed her manila folder.

“Thank you both.”

“Who else can we talk to?” Grandma Rose asked nervously.

“It’s not individuals who make these decisions.”

“Who makes them? Dogs? Computers?” Kijo could see Grandma Rose was on the verge of twisting the girl’s ear.

“There’s a process to these things,” the girl said. “Trust in the process.”

Kijo, embarrassed, took his grandma’s elbow and led her out.

Four months later, the house was condemned.

Kijo hadn’t really believed they would be forced to leave. And he hadn’t understood that the only place left to go was the West Side. The remaining houses in the city were too expensive, so they made their way to Vidal Court, the last of the government complexes, where all the tenants of Southfield Village had gone years back—all the riffraff Grandma Rose had worked hard to get rid off.

The day Kijo and his grandmother arrived, Lullaby sat in the parking lot in a lawn chair. “I’ve been waiting on you all.”

He was Haitian, light-skinned with blue eyes. A tattoo of a tree covered his back. Kijo could see a knife sticking out of his pocket.

“Does he know us?” Kijo asked Grandma Rose.

“All that man knows is trouble.”

They moved into a second-floor unit, and the first day, someone smashed their window. Neighbors said Lullaby was keeping them in line. It was an initiation; he taught everyone who arrived to be afraid.

Kijo stayed up the whole night installing two double-bolt locks.

From the window, Kijo would watch Lullaby sit in his blue lawn chair on the parking lot’s edge. He smoked cigars. No one walked in front of him, out of respect, or behind him, for fear Lullaby would think he was being attacked. Lullaby wasn’t a large man, but a shield surrounded him. Voices quieted and kids stopped dribbling basketballs as soon as he took up his spot in his plastic throne.

If Grandma Rose saw Kijo watching Lullaby, she’d say, “That boy is the devil.”

“That’s a
man,
Grandma.”

“No man goes around frightening women and children.”

“I bet no one ever did him wrong and went on their merry way.”

“What’s done is done.”

Grandma Rose had tried to make her peace with their new home; she hung the curtains from Freedom Avenue, set out her pictures of Elvis and Jesus. But after she got hit, Kijo felt ashamed that he had let them end up in Vidal Court. He replayed the moment by the elevator
at the Redevelopment Commission, sickened by the memory of how he had stood silently.

He decided one morning he would talk to Lullaby, but made it only as far as the bottom of the stairwell. It was mid-November, the air was gray and chilly. The parking lot was empty.

“Seems someone tried to redecorate your grandma’s face,” Lullaby called out, not looking at Kijo. “You from Freedom Avenue. They got you, too. Pretty soon they come for all of us.”

Kijo watched Lullaby knot a red scarf around his neck. He’d never had the feeling of both hating and admiring a person.

“And when that time comes”—Lullaby lit a cigar—“it’s fight or flight. That, my man, is primitive.”

ELEANOR

All that chatter about work, jobs.

Eleanor remembered when Colleen McKay called. Poof, out of the blue, the phone rang and she wanted to take Eleanor to lunch at the Century Club. It had been forever and a day since Eleanor had had a proper ladies’ lunch in the city, let alone lunch with a big-shot magazine editor.

Over the years, she had received phone calls here and there from Wellesley friends. After a fair amount of small talk about children and houses, it usually became clear, through restrained sniffles, that these women had suddenly found themselves at the fat, ugly start of a divorce. Penny Mitchell Davis was about to become Penny Mitchell again, Sue Sanders was phoning from her empty two-story Victorian in Toronto. They needed an ear, a voice from their past, from life before marriage, a reminder that there
had
been a life before the husband who was now off to Machu Picchu with a younger woman.

But Colleen said nothing about a dramatic life change, and it was the first time anyone had suggested a fancy lunch in the city. It seemed, in fact, celebratory. Eleanor let it be known to her gardening club precisely where she was going. She showed Gavin the website, she called Douglas and Denise. “Have you kids been to the Century Club? Oh, no reason, it’s just exclusive and I’m meeting my old college friend who’s a big-shot editor there… The architect Stanford White designed the building.”