Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
THE NARROW DOOR TO HIS grandmother’s “powder room” was open at the end of the long downstairs hall.
Mazelle Washington’s red, fur-lined robe swayed in the doorway, no longer on the living room mannequin.
Johnny felt his past bearing down on him with every step toward the robe’s fur-weighted hemline.
“Suits you,” he said to Tasha.
Tasha whirled around, startled. Her hands moved to her shoulders, as if to take off the robe. She had turned on two of the surviving bulbs on his grandmother’s vanity table, the only real furniture in the room. She posed in a mirror so dusty that it hid her face.
“I’m sorry, I planned to ask you…” she said. “Is this too old for me to wear?”
“No, keep it on. It’s like… that Alice Walker story?”
“ ‘Everyday Use,’ ” Tasha said, because of course she knew.
She smiled at him, impressed by his reference from Af-Am Lit.
He didn’t remember the story well, but it had resonated with him in grad school because it reminded him of his mother’s relationship with Bear Creek Lodge, always held at a distance, a tradition he had followed.
The story argued that family mementos should not be stored like artifacts.
Or hidden away, Johnny thought ruefully.
The rabbit fur grazed Johnny’s fingers as he gently caught the robe to prevent Tasha from easing it off.
No one in their family wore fur. The presence of real animal fur made the garment feel alive, and not just because of the way it shook loose so many jarring, fragmented images of his grandmother.
The folds of fabric under the sleeves had unfurled like a bat’s wings the first night he spent in this room.
God, he could even smell her. Had the robe retained her scent this long?
“You’re sure?” Tasha asked, seeing everything unsaid in his face, as always.
Sometimes Johnny felt annoyed when Tasha second-guessed his responses: I said it, didn’t I? But they both knew how he felt about Mazelle, even if she didn’t know everything yet. It was more than fair to ask.
“I’m sure. It’s probably good for me.”
Tasha smiled, hunching her shoulders so the fur collar would nuzzle her cheeks. “Good, because this thing feels decadent and divine,” she said. “If it had been mine, I would’ve worn it everywhere. In the yard. Movies. The grocery store.”
“Not in L.A.,” Johnny said, chuckling, and the sound of his own mirth made him realize that Tasha was already a kind of tonic for this room.
He’d physically flinched when he opened this door with Hollman two years ago, barely giving the room a glance.
The doorway wasn’t six feet high, which he hadn’t noticed when he was a kid.
With Tasha and the vanity table inside, he didn’t have room to fit, much less stand up straight.
But he could see its shape in the flickering light.
Of all the spaces in Bear Creek Lodge, this one might have changed the least. This room smelled its age.
The space was narrow and windowless, an afterthought.
Maybe she’d intended it to be a glorified closet that morphed into storage.
It was hard to imagine Mazelle sitting in front of this vanity mirror in such a dreary room instead of her more luxurious master bathroom down the hall.
She’d called it a “powder room” with that gold star on the door as a prop for visitors who saw it, but that wasn’t its true function.
“This is where she made me sleep,” Johnny said quietly.
Tasha looked at him with alarm that reminded Johnny of the way his mother had looked at him when he told her what happened on his visit. “But why? There are so many other rooms.”
“In fact, she promised Mom I could sleep in one of the cabins with Uncle Ricky,” Johnny said. “Mom didn’t want me to spend the night under Mazelle’s roof. But as soon as I got here, Mazelle was like, ‘This is all you.’ And said I would sleep in here.”
“Was there even a bed?” Tasha asked.
He pointed to the corner, where a cot was still stashed beneath the slanted ceiling. The piles of magazines and newspapers he’d moved in order to sleep on the cot had been returned, perhaps untouched in fifty years. “Oh, Johnny…” Tasha sighed. “That’s awful.”
“Later, Uncle Ricky told me this was her ‘punishment room,’ ” Johnny said. “But I hadn’t done anything except show up. It was like she was pissed at me because she hadn’t seen me in so long. But she knew damn well why Mom kept her distance.”
Tasha’s expression told him she was eager to ask questions, but she remained silent to let him find his own pace.
He looked at his watch: 4:27. The girls would be coming back soon—they’d better be, anyway—and he wanted to put eyes on them the minute they were late.
If not for two winters of watching them navigate bigger slopes, he wouldn’t have left them alone.
“We have time,” Tasha said.
“I’ll start with this…” Johnny said. “First night, I’m in here, miserable as hell…”
He could almost hear the Duke Ellington Orchestra playing from the living room and the sound of laughing adults oblivious to his misery.
They had all been fooled by Mazelle’s performative acts of grandmothering, her perfunctory hug, her constant corrections that her guests had viewed as love rather than pure power.
But he had seen how much she hated him from the time she first looked at him.
His only solace had been the flashlight he could read his Spider-Man comic books by and his cassette player and headphones that helped him escape to his own bedroom again, to a world where Mom was only a few steps away.
“… I’m listening to the Jackson Five on my tape player, grooving to ‘ABC’ or whatever…
and I must not have heard Mazelle knock on my door.
The next thing I know, she’s standing over me like some kind of bird of prey, those robe sleeves fanning, this ugly look on her face…
and she snatches the headphones from my ears. Scared the shit out of me.”
Tasha rubbed his arm, encouraging him to go on.
“… On the surface, it’s all love, like ‘You need to be sure to get your rest, sweetheart,’ and all that bull, but she took my player.
Took my music. She never gave them back either.
I lost three of my best tapes. This is a testament to the way Mom raised me, but it was the meanest thing any adult had ever done to me.
I’m in shock. I’m in here sobbing and crying and I touch my ear… and I see…”
Blood. A dot of blood as wide as his fingertip when he touched his ear, monstrous in his shaky flashlight beam.
“… She’d scratched me with her long-ass nails when she snatched those headphones off my ears. First night and I’m already bleeding. That was exactly the shit Mom was afraid of. My grandmother drew first blood the minute she got the chance.”
“What do you mean… ‘first blood’?” Tasha asked in a voice unsure if she actually wanted to hear his answer.
He had never felt a need to discuss his visits to Bear Creek Lodge outside of therapy, and he certainly never wanted to poison his daughters against a great-grandmother they would never meet.
But he hated to tarnish Tasha’s admiration of Mazelle Washington too.
“Excuse me,” Johnny said, and he eased past Tasha to move farther into the room, close to the cot. He leaned over to be sure he would fit, and Tasha had to shift until she was midway outside. He checked his watch again: 4:29. The girls should be back any minute.
But it was time for Tasha to know.
The cubbyhole door was still there where he remembered it. It looked like an elf’s door.
When he was thirteen, the small door had been paint-stuck and he had worried with it for a while before it opened, his project to stave off boredom and anguish.
But now it wasn’t fully closed, revealing a fragment of pure darkness inside.
Hollman had found the one-sheets he’d used to decorate the hallway buried in the cubbyhole, he remembered, although he had left the rest of the room undisturbed.
At least Johnny had the satisfaction of knowing that Mazelle was restless in her grave with those posters on display for anyone to see.
“Since I didn’t have anything else to do… I ended up looking in there,” Johnny said. “You want to write a book about Mazelle Washington?”
Tasha didn’t blink in the vanity table’s light, looking as if he’d caught her doing something she shouldn’t. “Yes, I do,” she said. A ring of defensiveness.
“Well, everything you need is in there—probably some of her old reels too.”
Tasha couldn’t hide the flutter of excitement in her eyes.
“Anything Mazelle owned is yours for your research. But I want you to know this: When I found her reels in here, I put them on. They had played a tribute to her in the living room, and the projector was all set up. But she didn’t play a single frame from her movies.
Instead, it was people fawning over her and how great she was.
So after everyone was in bed, I snuck out there to see her reels. I was just curious, to be honest…”
He remembered padding quietly across the floorboards, freezing when they squeaked.
Fumbling to thread the film. His delight when images danced on the flickering screen.
And that title, appearing like a magician’s illusion: LAZY MAZY GOES TO NEW YORK.
He had no idea who “Lazy Mazy” was—until he saw her appear on the screen.
Johnny told Tasha how his grandmother had been a young woman, in her mid-twenties, dressed in a maid’s uniform.
And how she was sitting at a kitchen table, stirring a large mixing bowl—all while she was nodding off, half asleep.
And when her two white employers caught her sleeping on the job, she jumped up and did a flip, somehow timing it so well that the mixing bowl landed on her head and spattered her head with batter that dripped down her face.