Chapter 20
Joel St. Clair and Dorinda Donovan met on the street. This was Memphis in the late eighties, their hair how it is now except when they met their hair was in style.
Dorinda, a college student, was walking home from school when she passed Joel leaning against a beat-up Volvo.
He reached for her dangling hand. This move never worked for him, but to his surprise she stopped.
The sun was reflected in her dark eyes, an impenetrable expression in them. “Nigga, don’t touch me again.”
Their first date was at a seafood spot. Over crab legs, she told him about the social work degree she was getting, about her desire to help families in need. He told her about the crawfish restaurant he planned to open, about his desire to fill people’s stomachs.
In his tiny living room (glass coffee table, dingy yellow carpet, busy floral drapes, busted AC unit), he fingered through his record collection. Dorinda chanted, “Lu-ther! Lu-ther!” bending and cracking her toes on his couch. Pressed against each other, they danced to Luther.
She didn’t discover his drinking problem until she moved in a year later. She’d find empty bottles stuffed in drawers, others rolling from under the bed. He never put his hands on her. According to her mother, that was supposed to mean something.
He lost his job for being drunk. But Dori found a new one, a good one, in DC with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
They packed their things (glass coffee table, record collection, not the floral drapes) and drove to a city not far from her childhood home in Maryland, but which Joel had seen only on the news.
By their fifth year in the District, they’d saved enough to buy a modest home. For a while, Joel had stopped drinking, had started working again. To say they were happy would be pat; they were making it work.
The new millennium wasn’t the end of the world but the beginning of one.
It brought the internet (“Look, Joel! I can buy slippers On Line!”) and something called globalization.
Collapsing towers, its brutal retaliation.
Endless wars that would end too late. Katrina to Joel’s home state. It also brought me.
Dorinda’s bulging stomach was a sign that things were finally happening for them after years of trying.
Joel did all the shopping, all the cooking, while she was pregnant.
When she was in labor for fifteen hours, he circled the room with a hawk’s intensity, too awake for his own good.
He left, returning with a dozen pink balloons and a basket of stale fruit dipped in bitter, hardened chocolate.
He refused to give me a name. He refused to let anyone else name me too. (“What do you mean you don’t wanna name her? Have you lost your mind? Fine, I’m naming her without you. Lisa’s pretty. What do you mean you’re not naming your child after my sister?”)
He was raised to believe if you didn’t name a thing, it couldn’t hurt you. Yet there I was with his head of hair too thick to comb; his eyes, wide and deep; his sharp nose that rounded suddenly to a stop. There I was, half him.
The night they brought me home, my cries were unending.
The night they brought me home, he got in his even-more-beat-up-than-before Volvo and drove to King Liquor.
In the end, they named me Catherine Elise after the grandmother who told stories on her sofa when I was a kid spending the stray summer month in New Orleans.
She had these hazel-green eyes that made me believe she was a snake; when I was running in the house, she’d flash them at me like flinging a stone.
She died when I turned eight. We never went back there.
It was like she took the idea of home with her to the grave.