Thirty-Three
THE NEXT WEEK, I’m in the restroom near the cafeteria, washing my hands, when Ginny walks in. I catch her reflection in the mirror. She barely glances up but then sees that it’s me, and she stops. It’s only the two of us, the long line of stall doors open.
“How are things in Listening?” she asks.
Enough to make me cry. This show we’re putting on for no one.
You were just in my bed, I want to say. You fell asleep with my hand across your hair.
But we’re tentative, polite, and I want to shake her, shake myself, wake us both up.
I want to know why she was crying. I want to know why she got into my car.
Once, I made the rules and obeyed them, and it was excruciating but it was clear.
And now nothing’s clear and I don’t know what we’re doing.
The door swings open and Claud’s there, gesturing for me to go out, tugging my arm, leading me down the hall. “The first layoffs were just announced. A long list of people, all of them on the union side.”
A ringing in my ears. “Al?” I ask.
“I hate to be the one to tell you.”
I race down the hall and up the flights of stairs to the third floor.
The secretaries are huddled together, talking low, dabbing eyes, and I open Al’s door without knocking and here he is.
Standing at his desk, placing a framed photograph of Adele and the kids into a box.
Bernard’s seated in the chair across the room. Both of them, silent.
“Al,” I say. “How could they do this?”
“Fifteen years,” he says. “Flawless performance reviews. Let go without a day’s notice.
” His jaw is set. A slight tremor in his hands as he packs his things.
“People are saying the bathrooms are bugged,” he tells me.
“Everyone knows that’s where most of the conversations take place. Be careful with what you say.”
“I’ll walk out with you,” I say. “I’ll hand in my resignation right now.”
He goes still for a moment, turns to Bernard, who says nothing. “I appreciate that, Odette. More than I can say. But the impact wouldn’t be worth your sacrifice. Not like, say, if some of my fellow managers found themselves similarly moved.”
Bernard’s eyes have been fixed to the corner of the room.
His gaze doesn’t waver. Al finishes clearing off his desk, takes the frames from his walls.
I ask the secretaries to find me some napkins and Ruby brings me a stack from the cafeteria.
I wrap Al’s lowball glasses from the wet bar, his framed artwork.
Once everything in sight is packed up, he opens the drawer to his files. Frowns down at them.
“Go ahead and leave them,” Bernard says. The first sentence he’s spoken.
A shadow across Al’s face. Voice low, he asks, “Are you sitting here as my brother? Or as the personnel manager?”
Bernard shifts in his seat, doesn’t answer, fixes Al with a hard stare. Al’s hands close into fists and I move my body between them. “Bernard,” I say. “You’d better go.” A silent moment. Terrible. My whole body on alert. Al enraged, Bernard seething. “Go,” I say again, and this time, he listens.
“I knew he was loyal to the company,” Al says. “But this?”
“I know,” I say. “I know.”
Later, I’m panic-stricken, thinking of my sisters.
Already distanced. Already missing Sunday dinners.
I call Adele and then Claire, asking them to come by on Saturday.
We sit together on my patio, drink cold beers to take the edge off.
I say, “Al and Bernard are going to need some time, I imagine.” Adele bites her lip.
Claire straightens her posture, sips primly from a glass.
I say, “We need to remember that we’re sisters. This is our family.”
“Try telling that to Bernard,” Adele mutters.
Claire pretends not to hear her, says, “Of course. Nothing could change my devotion to the two of you. And there are bound to be some hard feelings between the boys during this time, but it will be for the best in the end. How many years have they been going on about this union business? Soon they’ll have new things to talk about. A fresh start for everyone.”
“My husband is out of a job with a wife and three children to support.”
“Yes,” Claire says. “And I hope you know that Bernard had nothing to do with that decision. But a smart, professional man like Al? He’ll be employed again in no time.
He was hired on the spot when he interviewed at Columbia, remember.
A man with his intellect and charm and job experience—only a fool would turn him down. ”
Adele sighs. Acquiesces. “He has an interview with Dootsie Williams on Monday.”
Claire beams. “See?”
“He’s building a music center next to the Sportsman Bowl. Two fine, Negro-owned businesses for the community, side by side.”
“That’s wonderful,” I say. “Al’s always admired Dootsie Williams.”
“And he’s sure to get the job,” Claire says. “How exciting.”
Al does, in fact, get the job. Weeks pass.
Round after round of layoffs come, a sense of doom settles over the plant.
I miss Lionel, catch him on the phone when I can.
He’s doing fine in Oakland. He’s keeping an ear to the ground.
“Those bird men sure know how to hold a grudge,” he says.
He and Clément have weekly conversations, Clément on the phone at the kitchen table, going over notes, discussing each of the birds and how they’ve been faring.
When summer comes and Clément and Nathalie go to New Orleans, Lionel’s friend Maurice comes to tend to the pigeons.
I watch from the window as he fills their water and replenishes their seed, as he sweeps and carries the soiled hay to the street.
And then summer’s over. In the evenings, the kids come home from school with barely a hello.
They toss their backpacks on the sofa, breeze past me, talking only to each other, wrapped up in the complexities of their senior year.
I sit through dinner as they go on. I don’t say a word and they don’t notice and heat rises and there’s a sourness in my stomach, a taste I barely recognize.
In the mornings I pack lunches, make breakfast. Nathalie wrinkles her nose at a pan of fried eggs and says, “You never make French toast anymore.” Clément brings friends home after school to see the birds; they stay for hours; I never know how much dinner to fix.
One evening Nathalie’s waiting for me when I get home after drinks with Elise.
She says the Jefferson High music teacher has offered her an old piano.
“Just a little upright, perfect for learning,” she says.
The only thing is she’s measured and the one place it will fit is right in front of the fireplace.
Our winters by the fire. My living room, each painstakingly chosen piece of furniture in its right spot.
I tell her yes, it’s fine, she can accept it.
The next morning they graze kisses on my cheek on their way out the door, don’t bother clearing their dishes, and I don’t express my hurt or my frustration, don’t remind them to help me, just tally up each letdown like an answer marked wrong on a test.
After Thanksgiving we return to work to find, hanging on the lunchroom wall, a large-scale drawing of the plans for the new plant: an eighteen-acre campus with long narrow pools and low-roofed buildings, rows of eucalyptus trees and fountains and walls of windows.
Alongside the plans are the words: Join us in Santa Maria!
December comes and Columbia breaks ground, construction officially underway.
The same month, on Central Avenue and 135th, just two miles from his house, Al supervises the letters going up on the Dooto Music Center’s marquee: GRAND OPENING, DEC.
23, ARTISTS & CELEbrITIES. I host Christmas—my house neutral ground—heat the gumbo Claire made the day before.
Al and Bernard haven’t spoken in months.
They nod to each other on my patio, keep their distance all night.
In the kitchen, Claire says she and Bernard are talking about moving out of Compton.
Southwest from here, she says, there are new developments being built.
They could have more space. Maybe even a swimming pool.
The neighborhood isn’t what it used to be.
They could sell now while the prices are still good.
“What’s wrong with Compton?” Adele asks. “From my vantage point, it’s thriving. You should look at the Dooto Center’s calendar. Not only concerts and banquets but NAACP meetings and fundraisers for Negro candidates. Kids’ dance classes. I only wish it were here when the children were younger.”
“Sure,” Claire says. “But if you ask me there’s a reason Dootsie opened the center a couple miles south of here. Farther from Watts. Odette, you should really consider moving, too. You’re even closer to that mess.”
“I love my house,” I say. “My yard and my studio. I’m perfectly happy where I am.”
“With the shopping district half boarded up? All those people out of work?”
“Claire, why do you even need more space?” Adele asks.
Claire stiffens, takes it as a dig, a reminder of her only child, how much she’d hoped for two or three, and the mood grows tense and everything feels cast in red.
The things we don’t say, the resentments and hurts, they’re thick around us.
For the rest of the night the cousins laugh together and open their gifts, and Nathalie and Al pore over liner notes, and my sisters alternate helping me in the kitchen, no longer able to be in that tight space together.
And in the days after, in my studio, late into the night, I paint a vase of tulips and two water glasses, a stack of Claire’s McCall’s and Adele’s Jet magazines, everything in shades of red.
I let Elise through the gate on a January afternoon. “I have terrible jetlag,” she says, dropping her purse on my chair and kicking off her shoes.
“What would help?” I ask her. “Coffee? A drink?”
“Coffee sounds nice,” she says. “I love how you make it.”
She follows me to the kitchen, sits at the table with her feet up on a chair as I fill the glass percolator with water, set it on the stovetop and light the burner. “Tell me about the trip,” I say, measuring the coffee grounds.
“We spent Christmas in San Francisco. Joan’s moved on to self-portraits.” All these years later, just the mention of self-portraits makes me heavy with shame. I still can’t untangle them from the dizziness, the mess, the children’s fear. Elise says, “The work is magnificent. Maybe her best yet.”
“I hope to meet her someday. And see her paintings.”
“We’ll arrange it. You’d love each other.”
“And then you went to New York?” I say, crossing to the fridge for cream.
“Yes,” she says, a secret in her voice. “Finish making the coffee and I’ll tell you.
” She’s moving to New York. I can feel it.
My family is fracturing. The children leaving, the plant leaving.
Now Elise, too. I take down two blue-rimmed cups with saucers.
Pour the cream into a small pitcher. On the stovetop, the water is deepening to brown.
I might cry. I pour the coffee into our cups and sit.
She sips. “Delicious.” All I can do is wait for what she’s about to say.
“So you know how I’ve been wanting to open a gallery.
Espen’s finally in. We rented a space in New York, a nine-month lease.
We’ll put on a great show, see what kind of interest we get, hopefully make a bit of a splash.
And if we enjoy the experience, we’ll open up shop here in LA. ”
“LA,” I repeat, to be sure.
“Sunset or Melrose, most likely.”
My shoulders ease. “I was so afraid you were going to say you were moving there for good.”
“To New York? God, no. We’ll set up the show, be there for the first few weeks, and hire someone to work the rest of it.”
I sip my coffee, lean back and look at her, let the relief settle over me. Her dream, finally in motion. She’s smiling, relaxed, less dressed up than usual. “Your own gallery. A New York show. I’m thrilled for you,” I say. “This is wonderful.”
“It will be a group show.” She pauses, her eyes on mine. “Mostly established artists, but a brand new one, too. We hope.” And there’s a spark, a moment when I know what she’s going to say, and then she says it: “We want to include some of your paintings.”
Down in my studio, we pull all the paintings out, line them up like the day when Espen and Douglass came.
But this time it’s just Elise and me, and I have even more now, and she’s a beautiful sight, focused and discerning, stepping back and getting closer.
“Espen and I have already agreed on Clément’s poor bird.
We’ll show it even if it isn’t for sale. ”
“I’m sure he’ll lend it to you,” I say.
“And I have my heart set on the destroyed pink cake. The chair in the forest part is a must. Marriage Bed, of course. And I’m considering this one,” she says in front of a newer piece.
It’s a tablescape, inspired by one of Claire’s old issues of Better Homes and Gardens, with my own dishes and linens and candles against a background of vivid blue.
“There’s an expectation to it,” I say.
“And glorious imperfection. The tiny chip in the plate. The skewed angle of the fork.”
“One of the spoons is from a different set. See?”
“I do. It’s more cerebral than the others. Would you agree?”
I nod. “Not much of the terror Douglass was so fond of.”
She rolls her eyes. “Oh, Douglass. He’ll stay a know-it-all until he dies.”
I show her another new painting I’m pleased with, and we discuss how each piece “talks” to the others, as Elise puts it.
She chooses five paintings available for purchase, and Clément’s bird, which she’ll mark as already sold.
She talks about pricing, the amounts attached to each piece astronomical, nonsensical.
When we finally finish up in the studio, Nathalie is playing the piano.
We hear it from outside. “She sounds wonderful,” Elise says.
Inside, Elise tells her to keep playing, kisses her on the cheek, then collects her purse and heads home.
I fix some hot water with lemon and honey and I sit on the sofa with a magazine that I’m not reading.
I just flip through it so as not to make Nathalie uncomfortable.
All I’m doing is listening to her play. Who cares about a fire in the fireplace?
Who cares about the awkwardness of a piano set against a hearth?
Only another few months with them living here at home with me, and the weeks tick away so swiftly, and I’m finished with my small annoyances, I’m full of needing to hold on to the dwindling number of lunches I’ll pack for them, the mornings of waiting for Nathalie to finish in the bathroom so I can have my turn, and reading the paper with Clément over coffee, him asking me my opinion of whatever’s going on in the world.
And time passes, and I’m so occupied with holding on to it that before I know it, it’s spring.