The Summer We Got Free (5 page)

1976

G
eorge was
glaring at Regina across the kitchen table. Regina was muttering to herself.
Sarah was talking with her mouth half-full of food. Ava was sipping her coffee
and looking bored. This was the scene that Paul walked in on and it was
perfectly familiar, the same sort of thing you’d witness walking into the
Delaney kitchen on any Saturday morning, though sometimes George would be
sneering instead of glaring, Regina would be screaming rather than muttering,
Sarah would be talking with her mouth entirely full rather than half-full, and
Ava would be looking distracted rather than bored, which was the subtlest of
differences.

He was still
half-asleep and groggy, his exhaustion like a fog in his brain, and when he
came into the room he did not see, at first, what was different about the
scene, what was anything but familiar. It wasn’t until he had blinked a few
times that he realized that Ava didn’t look bored at all, but rather uneasy. It
was only after he had rubbed some of the sleep from his eyes that he saw that
Sarah wasn’t talking with food in her mouth, but rather laughing. He had to listen
more closely to hear that Regina wasn’t muttering to herself, but was speaking
calmly. And it wasn’t until he took a few more sluggish steps and could see down
to the other end of the table that he realized George was not glaring at Regina
at all, but at a woman who Paul was sure he was imagining, a vision from some
half-finished dream.

“Paul,” Sarah
said, “you up.”

Everyone at the
table turned and looked at him.

“You got
company,” George said.

His sister stood
up and took a few steps toward him. “Paul. I know I’m the last person you
expected to see.”

She had barely
changed in twenty years. She was still built like a twelve year-old. Thin and
flat-chested
, with knobby knees beneath the hem of her
skirt. Her black
black
skin was black as
ever,
her hair kinky and as short as his own, and he could
almost swear that the black, horn-rimmed glasses she wore were the same ones
she’d had at twelve. She couldn’t be real, he thought. He shook his head, and
waited for the dream to fade away.

“Paul, what the
hell’s the matter with you?” Regina said. “You going nutty or something?”

Paul looked at
his mother-in-law. “What?”

“It’s your
sister. Aint you gone say hello?”

The sleep-fog
lifted and Paul stared wide-eyed at Helena. “It is you,” he said.

She nodded.

“Aint this
something?” Sarah asked.

The smile that pulled across Paul’s face felt tight,
almost painful. “Yeah, it’s something, alright.”

“I know you
weren’t expecting to see me,” Helena said again.

He shook his
head. “How’d you know where to find me?”

“I asked around the old block. Somebody knew somebody
who knew where you lived.” She smiled. “You look just the same.”

He was sure he looked nothing like his scrawny,
fifteen-year-old self. He looked around at all of them at the table, at their
half-eaten breakfasts. “How long
you been
here?”

“Not long. I didn’t want to wake you, and Sarah said
you’d be up soon.”

He wouldn’t have gotten up at all, would have slept
for hours more, if not for the fact that the temperature in the house had risen
so much that he’d woken up dripping sweat and couldn’t get back to sleep.

“You hungry?” George asked. “Ava, get the man
something to eat.”

“That’s okay, baby, I aint hungry,” Paul said to Ava,
who hadn’t moved anyway. “Where you been living?" he asked his sister.

“Baltimore,” she said. "After Uncle Reese died,
Aunt Vicky moved down there to be closer to her family, and she took me with
her."

"Uncle
died, huh?"

She nodded.
"Stroke."

"That's a shame," he said, and wondered if
he sounded sincere.

“She on her way to New York,” Sarah said. “For a
teaching job.”

“You a teacher?” he asked. “A real one?”

“Sure.”

“You went to college, then?”

She nodded.

This time his smile came easy.

“Y’all sit down,” Regina said. “You know I don’t like
people hovering around the table like that.”

Helena took her seat and Paul went and grabbed an extra
chair from the dining room and placed it next to Ava. "I'm surprised
anybody from the old block knows where I am,” he said. “I aint been back around
the neighborhood much since right after I turned eighteen. Without you and Mama
there it aint feel like home no more. Which was real bad for me, 'cause I was dying
for a little bit of home right then."

"Well, it
looks like you found it," Helena said, glancing at her brother’s wife. She
asked how long Ava and Paul had been married and what they both did for work.
When Paul said they’d both worked at the art museum, and that Ava still did, Helena
said, "I tried to get a job there when I was a teenager. My best friend
worked there and she talked me up to her boss. He hired me over the phone. But
when he saw me, he changed his mind. He said I was so black I'd distract people
from the art. He said that to my friend, not to me. He told me he'd forgotten
he'd promised the job to somebody else."

George looked down at his plate.

Sarah shifted
her weight on her chair,
then
reached for her coffee.

Paul remembered
the trouble his sister’s skin had caused them as children, the fights he got
into almost daily in her defense,
the
fights she got
into herself.

"Does my
brother ever talk about me?" Helena asked Ava, glancing at Paul.

“Of course I do,” Paul said. “That’s a silly
question.”

“I aint heard you mention her but two or three times,”
Regina said. “In what? Five years?”

“Mama, drink your tea,” Sarah said. “It’s getting
cold.”

When they were done eating breakfast, Helena went to
use the bathroom, and the second she was gone, Sarah cornered Paul at the sink,
where he was stacking plates. “Aint you gone ask your sister to stay?”

“What you mean,
stay? She on her way to New York for a job.”

“Yeah, and she
said that interview aint for two weeks. I know she’d like to stay for at least
a few days.
You aint seen her in nearly twenty years.
You’d feel awful if you let her go away from you again so soon.”

“Sarah, stop
telling people how they supposed to feel,” George said. “If Paul don’t want her
here, that’s his business.”

“It aint that I
don’t want her here—”

“But they ought
to spend at least a week catching up,” Sarah said.

“Three seconds
ago it was a few days,” George said, “
now
it’s a week?”

Paul shook his
head. “I won’t have
no time to spend with her.
I’m working
every day and almost every night.”

Sarah waved a
dismissive hand. “I got the weekend off, and Ava’s off Monday. We can take care
of her when you aint here. Can’t we, Ava?”

Ava shrugged. “I
don’t know. I guess. If that’s what Paul wants.”

He mistook her
unusual uneasiness for her usual indifference and in this matter it was
welcome. He didn’t want to be pressured about this. It wasn’t that he didn’t
love his
sister, that
he hadn’t missed her, but he
knew it seemed that way. Sarah was peering at him and he knew she was wondering
why he was so reluctant. It just wasn’t right to see your only sister again
after so many years and not be happy. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy. It wasn’t
that.

***

Paul opened the windows in every room, and the back
door, trying to lure a breeze. He had never known it to be so hot inside that
house. It was always cold in there, even in summer. He sat with his sister at
the kitchen table, smoking and listening to her tell about Baltimore, piecing
in some of the parts of her life that he had missed. George had said he was
going to read the paper and left. When Ava and Sarah finished cleaning up, Ava
left, too, mumbling something about housework, but Regina and Sarah stayed, and
it was mostly Sarah who asked questions and engaged Helena, while Paul
listened. She told them how she had put herself through college while working
for a doctor’s family, helping the wife, who was sickly, with their four
children. After she had finished school, she had started teaching third grade
and had taught it for four years before leaving.

“Aint you gone
miss your students?” Sarah asked her.

“Yes. But it was
time to move on,” she said. “And I’ve always wanted to move back to New York. I
lived there for a couple of years when I was in my early twenties.” She looked
at her brother then. “What about you, Paul? Have you been in Philadelphia all
this time?”

He nodded. “I
thought about moving somewhere else after I…well, when I turned eighteen. But
everybody I knew was here, and I guess I aint much of a wanderer.”

“A little
wandering can be good for the soul, I think,” Helena said. “But so can the
places you know, the places that know you.”

“I don’t know
about Philly being good for nobody’s soul,” Paul said. “But the cheesesteaks is
good.”

They all laughed at that, including Regina, who was
still sitting at the table. They looked over at her and it was plain that she
wasn’t laughing with them. She was still staring down into the cup of
peppermint tea that Sarah had reminded her to drink half an hour ago. She
hadn’t looked up from it in all that time. They heard her say something that
sounded like, “Maddy, I miss you.”

“Is your mother
alright?” Helena whispered.

Sarah shook her
head no and glanced at the clock on the wall above the kitchen door. “But she ought
to be pretty soon.”

“Paul, why don’t
we take a walk,” Helena said. “Would you mind, Sarah? If I had a little time
alone with my brother?’

“Oh. I guess not.”

Paul frowned. Walking
was the last thing he felt like doing. Next to being alone with his sister.

There was history in the peppermint tea. There was
years ago in it. Staring down into it, Regina could see people and things long
gone. Right there on the surface of the tea, she could see the kitchen
reflected, but it was not the kitchen where she now sat. Gathered around the
table were her children, all three of them together as they had not been in
almost twenty years. A younger incarnation of Regina herself stood by the
stove, watching them, and the lack of worry, the absence of fear in that Regina's
eyes made the Regina sitting at the table want to call out to her other self,
to ask her how she dared look so unafraid when the end of the world was coming.
She opened her mouth to say something to her, something like, "Why don’t
you see?" but the image in the teacup changed then, and instead of her
children around the table she saw
Maddy's
face. Her
old friend, smiling and laughing, the way Maddy always used to, as if she'd
just told one of those raunchy stories she always liked to tell about her good
for nothing ex-husband, the laughter causing her shoulders to shake as she
threw her head back. "Maddy," Regina whispered to her, "I miss
you, girl." But the Maddy in the tea could not hear her. Regina hunched
down closer to the cup and watched the image on the tea's surface change again.
Reflected there now was the main sanctuary of Blessed Chapel Church of God, on
a Sunday, packed with worshippers, all of them on their feet and clapping as
the choir sang, feet stomping and tambourines shaking and arms reaching up in
exaltation. The light through the stained-glass windows threw
sunstreaked
color on the heads of the congregation, who
sang and shouted about the glory of the Lord. Regina could not hear the song,
but the movement of the bodies sounded to her like
His Eye
Is
On the Sparrow.
It had been
Geo's favorite hymn and Regina could remember, back when he was in the
children's choir, the way he would lift his voice and close his eyes at the
refrain. “
His eye is on the sparrow, and
I know he watches me
.” When this image also faded from the tea, no new
scene replaced it. Regina sat there at the kitchen table, still staring into
the cup, and she could feel her head clearing now, her mind coming uncluttered.
As she came back to her sanity, as it moved through her with purpose, like a
spirit coming through a dark house out into the day, she got up from the table
and left the kitchen, walking through the foyer and up the stairs to her
bedroom, and she could still hear Geo's voice, singing those words that, now,
after everything, only mocked him. "
I
sing because I'm happy. I sing because I'm free
."

***

Regina emerged from her bedroom a little while later
and when she walked by the bathroom she saw Ava on the floor, on her knees,
scrubbing the bathtub. She leaned against the doorframe and watched her
daughter, who was sweating in the warmth of the small space. When Ava paused to
wipe sweat from her brow, she saw her mother there and she knew immediately
that Regina had changed. “You back, Mama?” she asked.

Regina nodded.
"I'm back."

To anybody who didn't know Regina, she would have been
unrecognizable from only a few minutes ago. Her hair was combed now, and held
in a neat bun at the back of her head. She had changed out of her tattered
housecoat, into a plain cotton dress, all the buttons of which were fastened correctly.
The
most stark
difference, though, was the look in her
eyes. It was steady now. Clear.
Almost Normal.

“Didn’t Sarah clean that tub yesterday?” Regina asked.

“Did she?”

Regina nodded.

Ava sighed,
then
looked
thoughtful. “Mama, what did you mean before, when you said you thought I was
the one I used to be? Do you remember saying that, at the door?”

“I think so,” Regina said. “But I was probably just
talking nonsense, Ava. You know better than to listen to anything I say when
I’m like that.”

“I know. But the way you looked at me, it was like you
really saw something.”

“I don’t know what I thought I saw, but maybe I was
thinking about how you was when you was young.”

“What do you mean? How was I?”

“You remember how wild you was. How happy.”

“Was I?” Ava asked. “I don’t remember that.”

Regina shrugged. “Well. People change. Girls grow up.”

Still, Ava
thought, she should be able to remember being wild and happy. She was only
aware of ever being exactly as she was now. That bothered her, although she
wasn’t exactly sure that there was something to be bothered about. In the
doorway with Helena, though, just for a moment, she
had
felt wild.
And happy.

It was still early, not yet noon, but the sun had burned
off the morning chill and the air outside had become warm and soft. Paul and
Helena walked down towards Fifty-Eighth Street, towards the park at the end of
the block.

"You lied to your family about where you went
when we split up,” Helena said.

Paul stopped
walking, looked at her. “Y’all talked about that?”

“I didn’t tell
them where you really went, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He was relieved. "I don't want them knowing
nothing about it.
Juvie
was the worst time of my life
and I don't want to think about it, let alone tell nobody."

"Even your
wife?"

He didn’t
answer.

“Will you tell
me about it?”

He took his
hands from his pockets and folded his arms across his chest. “If I was gone
tell anybody, it’d be you. But I’m not.”

They walked on, farther
down the block, and Paul noticed people on their porches looking out at them. Audrey
Jackson and Lillian Morgan, older ladies who had lived on the block for decades
and who Paul knew had been friends of his in-laws long years ago, now only stared
and whispered whenever Paul or anyone in his family walked by, and today was no
exception. Vic Jones, the burly, middle-aged bus driver who lived across the
street and always had a menacing look to offer any one of the
Delaneys
, leaned over his porch railing, his arms folded
across his chest, his eyes narrowed. Paul remembered the brick through the window,
which had been pushed from his mind by his sister’s arrival.

"Well, then
tell me about Ava,” Helena said. “What's she like?"

“She’s steady. Easy.
She aint all moody and emotional like most women are.”

“Really? Hmm. I
thought I sensed some…complexity in her.”

“Ava?” He shook
his head. “I wouldn’t ever call her
complex
.
With Ava, what you see is what you get. There aint too many surprises.”

“Oh,” Helena
said. “I wonder what gave me that idea.”

“Well, what
about you? You aint never got married or had kids or nothing?”

“I don’t know
about ‘or nothing,’” she said. “But no, I never got married or had kids.”

“You still got
time. You aint but thirty.”

The park was
almost empty of people, but the few who were there, sitting on the scattered
benches, stared openly at them as they walked by. The looks Paul usually got
from his neighbors, looks of disapproval and disdain, were now accompanied by
double-takes
at his sister, and outright gawking. Paul
glanced at Helena, who seemed to notice but not to be bothered about it, and he
realized how used she must have gotten to being stared at. It had always
bothered her as a child, but over so many years she must have learned to ignore
it.

As they circled
through the park, Helena suddenly asked, "Are you happy, Paul?"

He shrugged. “I
love my wife, and I got steady work, so, yeah, I guess I'm happy as I can be.
What about you? You happy?”

She shook her
head. “No. I’m not. But I’m trying to be.”

“Seems like you
doing alright, though,” he said. “Better than a lot of people I know.”

She frowned. “Do
you know how much I have come to hate that word?
Seems.
People use ‘seems’ to keep from having to really know
anything. They just decide how something seems and they don’t have to look any
deeper, or go any further, or ask any uncomfortable questions.”

“Hold on, now,”
he said, stopping at the end of a path, “I aint seen you in almost twenty years
and you aint been here two hours yet, so if I aint asking the right questions
fast enough, you can feel free to just come on out and tell me why you here,
why you showed up after all this time. You aint got to wait for me to ask.”

She looked
surprised and a little hurt.
 
He
wasn’t trying to hurt her, but he didn’t know how to communicate with this
woman who was his sister, but who he did not know. She sighed, and shook her
head slightly as if answering a question that had not been asked. “I don’t feel
like walking anymore,” she said.

“Me, either.”

They abandoned their walk and went back to the house
and when they reached the bottom of the stairs Helena caught sight of the
broken window. “What happened there?”

He walked past
her up the steps. “Some kids messing around out here, I guess,” he said,
because that was the last thing he felt like explaining right then.

Helena’s train was leaving at two. Ava came downstairs
to say goodbye. She’d spent the last hour in her bedroom, thinking about what
her mother had said. She thought that maybe if she looked at Helena again,
really looked at her, she would see what she had seen, and feel what she had
felt, that first moment at the door, and would understand it. She stood before
her now, in the foyer, and although she still felt a little bit lightheaded, a
little bit off-kilter, she did not feel the thing that had surged up in her and
made her kiss a strange woman on the mouth. She frowned, a little disappointed.

“Well,” she said to Helena, “have a safe trip.”

“Thank you, Ava.”

“Promise you’ll
come and see us again,” Sarah said, looking unhappy, and Helena promised she
would.

Paul had offered to accompany his sister to the train
station down at Thirtieth Street and now he grabbed her suitcase and portfolio
and walked behind her out the door.

They made it as far as the front porch before Ava rushed
out after them. “Stay a few days,” she said.

Both Helena and Paul turned and looked at her. She
could not read the look on Helena’s face, but Paul looked confused.

“Y’all can really catch up,” Ava said. “Wouldn’t that
be nice, Paul?”

Paul hesitated. Then nodded. “I guess so.”

“It’s not too
much trouble?” Helena asked, looking at Paul, not Ava. “Y’all have room?”

“We can make it
work,” Ava said.

Sarah looked
ready to shit with excitement. “This is wonderful!” she shrieked. “You can take
my room, Helena, and I’ll sleep with Mama.”

Helena insisted she was an easy guest and that she didn’t
want them going to any trouble for her. “You’ll probably forget I’m here,” she
said. But it did not turn out that way at all.

***

“What’s Baltimore like?” Sarah asked Helena. They were
sitting on the back porch steps now, drinking iced tea and smoking, because the
kitchen had become too hot for habitation.

“It’s not that
different from Philadelphia,” Helena told her. “Smaller. They have good
seafood. Especially crab legs.”

“Ooh,” Sarah
said.

Paul rolled his
eyes. Sarah was spreading it on thick. What was so special, all of a sudden,
about crab legs?

“What do you do, Miss Sarah?” Helena asked.

“You mean for
work?”

“Sure. But also
tell me what you do for play. What makes you happy when you do it.”

Sarah was not
used to anyone showing any real interest in her. She had spent her life from
aged two to fifteen being stuck in the shadow of Ava’s specialness, and the
years since stuck in the shadow of Geo’s death, and she could not recall, in
all of her adult life, ever being asked what she did that made her happy. She
told Helena that she worked at a bank as a teller and had for several years. As
for what she did that made her happy, she said there was nothing.

“But there must
be. Think harder.”

She thought
harder. “I don’t know. I like to knit. I make sweaters in the winter.”

“Does that make
you happy?”

Sarah shrugged.
She felt disappointed that she couldn’t come up with anything, not because it
meant that there was nothing in her life that made her happy, which there
wasn’t, but because she feared she couldn’t hold the interest of the only
person who had shown any interest in her in a very long time. Worried that
Helena would think she was unworthy of her attention, she blurted out,
“
I used to love a man who was happy about fire.”

Helena clapped
her hands together, delighted. “Tell me.”

“It’s silly,”
Sarah said.