Thirty-Eight
IT COMES on a sweltering August afternoon.
A Wednesday, two years after the kids moved out and Ginny moved in.
I’m checking the mail in my painting smock and here it is.
Startling, my vision doubling. A pale orange envelope, sent to my name.
The return address says Mary Beth Greer, but I would recognize her handwriting anywhere.
I go back through the gate, sit on the garden steps to read it.
Delphine says she’s living in San Francisco.
She’s wondering if Nathalie and I might be open to calling her, or even coming for a visit.
There’s something important that I need to talk to both of you about, she writes.
I go straight into the house and call Nathalie.
We have an agreement that whenever—if ever—I hear about Delphine, I’ll tell her right away.
I hurry as I press the numbers, each second that passes like another betrayal. “Delphine wrote me,” I tell her.
“Read it to me,” she says. So I do.
“We can handle this however you want to,” I say.
“Okay,” Nathalie says. “I have to go to class but … Okay let’s talk about it later.”
For the past few days, I’ve been working on a commission for the Dooto Center.
My first time doing anything like it. It’s a painting of the stage in their new private lounge.
Velvet curtains and slick floor, instruments set out and waiting for the players.
Back down in my studio, the painting is unfamiliar.
The colors are strange, I can’t find the right music.
There’s a buzz in my chest, in my brain, a thrum of anxiety that keeps me from sinking into anything.
And the heat. I surrender to it, wash my brushes, cover my palette to keep the paints good for tomorrow, hang up my smock.
I find a shaded spot on the patio, close my eyes.
Delphine wrote to me.
I wake on the patio to sounds of the gate swinging open, and something farther away, too. A distant crowd. Ginny’s coming down the steps in her scrubs. “Something’s happening,” she says. “People are out on the street. We should go see.”
She stops to kiss me, doesn’t rush it, her mouth against mine and lingering, before going inside to change. I follow her in, wet a washcloth and run it over my face, on the inside of my elbows and my knees, under my arms. “Are we walking?” I ask.
“Yeah, that’ll be better,” she says. I pull on the Converse sneakers the kids gave me for my birthday last year, tie their laces.
Delphine’s letter is tucked in the alcove next to the telephone, a charge to it, so much more than folded paper and ink.
I tell Ginny about it as we walk, drawing closer to the commotion, the sound of the crowd intensifying, the atmosphere on the streets matching the tumult in my body, so much so that I wonder if my opening Delphine’s letter set whatever this is into motion.
“Hey Ginny, Odette.” There’s a hand on my wrist and I turn and it’s Lionel’s friend who tends the birds when Clément’s away.
“Maurice,” Ginny says. “This is wild, right?”
Maurice tells us to follow him, and soon I see where we’re headed. A house with a stoop that rises several feet above the street, more familiar men presiding over it. “How’d you spot us in all this?” Ginny asks.
“Wasn’t that hard,” Maurice says, his smile teasing, and I look into the sea of people and almost all of them are colored, several shades darker than me, let alone Ginny.
He tells us that everyone was outside trying to get some relief from the heat when a man named Marquette was pulled over for speeding and proceeded to fail a sobriety test, too.
“Nothing unusual,” Maurice says. “Except then his mother comes and makes a scene, and his brother’s there, too, and things get out of hand.
Soon there’s a bunch of cops all over Marquette—who is in handcuffs, by the way—and the crowd’s growing bigger and more bothered by the second.
Everybody at a breaking point with the heat and the police acting the way they do.
And then the cops, for some reason, they go after this woman in the crowd and arrest her, and all hell breaks loose.
People are spitting on the cops, throwing rocks at a patrol car.
And look. More of us coming every second. ”
“Must be thousands,” Ginny says.
Maurice says, “You’d better go home.”
Ginny frowns. “I’ve lived here for years. These are my neighbors.”
“Ginny knows everyone,” I say.
“Not everyone,” Maurice says. A car’s trying to get through the crowd and people stop to look inside of it.
Someone picks up a rock, aims at the dash, lets it fly.
The windshield cracks and I gasp. “Look at who’s driving,” Maurice says, to prove his point.
A white man behind the wheel, eyes frantic. A white woman next to him, cowering.
A voice rises from the crowd. “Let them pass.” They get away but the crowd follows, hurling rocks and bottles, and I say, “Okay, yes, we’ll go.
” Maurice says he’ll walk us, has another of Lionel’s friends come, too.
They get us out of the swarm, halfway to home, and we walk alone the rest of the way.
Inside, I call Clément and Nathalie’s apartment.
Clément answers and I tell him what’s going on. “Better stay in Westwood for now.”
But he and Nathalie come anyway, later that night, awestruck and giddy. “You should see it out there,” Nathalie says. “I’ve never seen so many people all together at once. We saw a car flipped over at the corner of Imperial and Avalon—on fire. We brought overnight bags.”
Now that they’ve made it safely I’m happy they’re here, and Ginny’s already taking blankets down, opening up the foldout bed in their old room. The phone rings and it’s Adele.
“What’s it like where you are?” I ask.
“People are pouring out of the houses and heading up to Watts,” she says. “Elizabeth and Paul took off running, I couldn’t stop them. I told them to go to your house if things felt too out of control. That we’d join them there.”
“Clément and Nathalie are here, too. Come anytime.”
She says they will but calls me back. “There’s no way to get through,” she says. “We started to drive but had to turn back around. We’ll try again in the morning.”
Elizabeth and Paul show up a couple hours later, Rudy with them.
Elizabeth’s wearing her hair in a natural style, a curly halo, like a saint in a painting.
Holiday jumps onto her lap and she croons and pets him.
Rudy and Paul sport matching goatees. I hug them, one by one, while Ginny welcomes them into the house.
“Your mother wants you to call her,” she says.
Rudy dials. He answers Adele’s questions, assures her they’re all right.
“I need to talk to Dad for a minute,” he says.
I slice apples at the counter, rummage in the refrigerator for cheese to slice while he gives Al instructions.
“Wait until the morning to come. Make Mama lie down across the seat when you drive over, and there are hand signals you should know. Whenever you pass any brothers on the street, flash them two fingers. One finger’s for Watts, two’s for Compton, three’s for Willowbrook.
No one from the outside is welcome right now. ”
Al heeds the warning. When they arrive at eight in the morning, blankets and pillows under their arms, Adele says, “He made me lie down across the back seat on the drive over. Can you believe it?”
I take her aside the first chance I get, say low, “Delphine sent me a letter. She wants to see Nathalie and me.”
Her eyes widen. “What for? Did she say?” I shake my head. “I thought it would never happen,” she says. “After all these years…”
And then Paul’s speaking loudly, for all of us to hear. “Clément, Nathalie, Mama, Auntie O—Ginny, obviously—none of you should be going out anytime soon.”
Clément puffs his chest. “I agree about the others but I’m not staying in.” He and Rudy talk it over, decide he can go as long as he sticks close.
Claire calls a little later. “This is what I’ve been talking about all these years,” she says.
“Why we had to move. This is what I’ve been afraid of.
You can say what you must about the South but at least there there’s some dignity.
Here it’s just lawlessness. Who sets fire to cars on their own streets? ”
“I don’t know if I agree,” I say. “You know that young woman in Selma? The one who was in all the papers, beaten by the police on the street?”
“Amelia Boynton,” Claire says.
“Is that really what we have to do? Just take it? Forever?”
“We?” Claire says. Her voice is dangerous, a live wire between us. “I can’t say that I recognize myself or our family in those people on the streets.”
I stretch the cord to the window. Our nephews start up the garden steps, Al and Clément and Elizabeth a few paces after them.
“Our family members are the people in the streets,” I say.
“They were there last night and they’re headed out again now.
Claire. We all left the South to come here because we had to.
You and me and Adele and all the other colored people in the neighborhood. We’re the same.”
“We are not the same,” she says, and we can’t agree on any of it, and eventually we hang up.
Hours pass. Al and the kids come and go.
We make pitchers of iced tea, deviled eggs, sandwiches on soft white bread.
We huddle around the television to watch the reports.
Surreal, to see the images that pair with the near-constant sound.
I wonder if Delphine’s watching from San Francisco.
If she’s worried about us, if she’s waiting for us to call.
Nathalie sits outside while Clément and her cousins are gone, picking at the wooden steps, watching the gate. The noise from Watts, carrying over. Delphine’s letter, still tucked by the phone.
“Have you thought about it?” I ask her.
“Yes,” she says. “I’m still thinking.”