Mable rolled her eyes for the twentieth time that Christmas Day, but said nothing. Delia pretended that nothing was wrong. But then that was her life. Pretend.
I said the grace. Some meaningless words I learned at Sunday school years earlier. Words that never seemed to help me and so I had packed away the memory of them deep inside me and struggled to reach them when Hy-Lo said, “Kenzie, you say grace.”
He was drunk too. His posture was unsteady and his steps unsure. I imagined he’d had quite a few Christmas cocktails between work and home. Had probably had a few with Charlie, Randy, and Carol before sending them on ahead of him. “I’ll be there. I’m going to have one more with Paul. Robert. Jefferson. The man on the moon and anyone else who walks through that door. Y’all go on ahead.”
He had a drink in his hand. The third drink since he walked through the door and threw Charlie and Carol out. He set the glass down close to the edge of the table and then lifted the knife to slice into what was left of the turkey. He sliced a piece off the breast and plucked it up with his fingers and popped it into his mouth. It was tradition in our home, one he had created.
He chewed slowly and then lifted his glass and drained it. We waited.
“Delia,” he said, and her name was a low groan in his mouth. “This turkey is dry.”
Delia dropped her eyes and said nothing. Intermission was over; the second act had begun.
“I said the turkey is dry, Delia.”
Delia’s fingers came to her mouth and I started pulling at my cuticles.
“Get my coat, Sam,” Mable said and folded her arms across her chest. “Grab Delia’s too. Kids, get your coats.” Mable had had enough. She was clearing out the house. “What type of Christmas is this for your wife and your kids, Hyman? Your brothers come in here all drunk and insult your mother.” Randy flinched at her words and looked up at the ceiling. “You come home just as drunk,” she continued, her voice growing, filling the kitchen. “It’s Christmas, for God’s sake.” Mable shook her head in disgust and ran her fingers over Malcolm’s head.
“Delia and the kids ain’t going nowhere. You, well, you’re welcome to go.”
“Delia, is this how you want it?” Mable was staring at her daughter with an intensity I had never seen.
“Mama, I—” Delia wasn’t able to utter another word. She threw her hands up to her face and began sobbing.
“Shut up!” Hy-Lo screamed at her. “Shut up now, Delia!” I felt my own tears push forth. I wanted to go. I wanted Delia to come with me and leave this apartment forever.
“Delia, I did not raise you this way.” Mable spoke softly as if to herself instead of her daughter. “I did not raise you this way.” She turned to retrieve her coat.
I peered up into my grandmother’s face. My eyes pleaded for her to stay. I wanted her to stay so that my Christmas would not end with my father choking my mother until she coughed and gagged for air. I did not want my Christmas to end with Delia locked in the bathroom, wailing, while Hy-Lo sent me and Malcolm off to bed so that we would not see him removing the bathroom door from its hinges with his trusty screwdriver. My eyes said,
Please.
So loudly that Mable almost handed her coat back to Sam, but then Hy-Lo spoke again.
“And you don’t ever have to come back here again. Ever.”
That was it. Mable snatched her coat and stormed out of the apartment. No final words, no rolling eyes, just heavy quick footsteps and slamming doors.
“The turkey is dry, Delia.” We were back at the middle and Hy-Lo waited for an answer. “Stop your sniveling, Delia!” He turned to her and plucked her on her head, atop the healing gash on her forehead.
Malcolm and I jumped at the sound, the thick timbre of it as the back of his fingernails made contact with her skin.
“Ahhhhh!” Delia wailed and grabbed at her head. “The turkey is dry, Hy. The turkey is dry, Hy!” She moved with a swiftness that I’d thought she’d lost a long time ago and pushed past him with a strength he thought he’d beat out of her long ago. She grabbed up the ceramic container with the mutilated turkey and moved to the window. “The turkey is dry the turkey is dry the turkey is dry.” Her words ran together like a Gothic chant.
Hy-Lo folded his arms across his chest. His face looked bored. “Delia!” His voice rang through the apartment; my ears began to ache.
Delia stood in front of the window, and with a force she must have pulled from deep down in her gut, she flung the ceramic container that held the turkey out through the closed pane. Glass went flying everywhere. End of act two, scene two.
The cold blew in and around Delia. The bitterness of it pulled her back to her senses. She stopped chanting and turned to look at us. Malcolm and I had our mouths open so wide that we could feel the cold pulling at our teeth.
Hy-Lo said nothing. His eyes held mild amusement. “Well, kids, see what your meathead mother did?” He looked at us and for some reason he sounded like the teacher in my third period science class, as if he were explaining the basics of biology. “And the ham is still not done.” He shook his head and unfolded his arms, preferring to shove his hands in his pockets now.
Delia just stood there braving the cold amidst the flapping sound of the ravaged miniblind. I was waiting for the pounding to begin, but Hy-Lo had been struck sober by my mother’s crazed act.
He stepped around the table and past us. We still did not move, half-expecting he would send us to our room, but he said nothing and then he was heading past us, coat in hand and out the door.
We didn’t have turkey that year. But we had ham and all of the rest of the trimmings. After Delia composed herself she threw on her black wool coat with the embroidered collar and went to the store and bought a box of big black plastic bags. She took the broom and broke out the rest of the splintered glass from the windowpane and then taped up three bags over the opening.
We had dinner in the living room. We sat on the floor around the tree, eating dinner and drinking cider. The television was on in the background to help fill the silence that fell around us every once in a while.
We watched
It’s a Wonderful Life
before we went off to bed and Delia cried at the end. I knew her tears weren’t for the characters, but for herself and us.
I
left Hy-Lo and went home to search through old pictures, looking for the periods in my life when I was happy. Black-and-whites, colored photos, and bent and ragged Polaroids lay scattered around me. We had boxes of pictures. Endless squares of memories that marked each year of our lives. I snatched up picture after picture and put aside the ones that showed me smiling. Out of the hundred or so that lay around me, I was only smiling in fourteen.
I looked at each one carefully, searching for a trace of real happiness, but after more than an hour I found only three where my smile was genuine. The others held smiles that had been asked for. “Smile for the camera.” “Say cheese, Kenzie.”
Even the pictures of my time spent away from our home showed unhappiness. By then, though, I had been unhappy for so long that it had penetrated my features and had taken hold of my character.
I looked again at the younger me surrounded by my classmates. Them grinning, me grimacing. I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror, still grimacing, still sad, still unhappy.
Mable was the one who had suggested it. I had no idea that anything like it really existed outside of the movies.
Boarding school.
She had a book full of them. Schools all over the country.
Schools that had classes that would enrich the lives of young adults. That was their line. The small black-and-white pictures in the book reminded me of the colorful glossy brochure I had from Camp Crystal Lake. Laughing children. Most of the faces were white. Others were Asian. Very few were black.
“You remember Jessica Nettles from around the corner?” Mable was talking fast and low as if someone would walk in at any moment and catch her sharing a secret with me. “Well, she went to one of these schools, she loved it, and now she’s in college somewhere down south. Black college, I think.”
She moved to the kitchen and grabbed the dish towel off its hook. Nothing needed wiping; she just needed to have something in her hands, something to twist and curl. “They have classes that you wouldn’t get in regular schools. They do things these city schools don’t do.”
I listened to her go on and on as if she were the national spokesperson for boarding schools. I flipped slowly through the pages of the book, through Arizona, Colorado, Delaware. There was at least one school in every state.
“Could I come home on the weekends?” I asked, cutting off Mable’s continuous babble.
She stopped midword and looked at me. “Why would you want to, baby?” she asked without even a hint of humor behind it.
She was afraid for me, afraid of who I might become living with Hy-Lo and Delia. She was afraid for Malcolm too, but would have to deal with us separately.
“Well, it’s just that some of these schools are so far away from home. I mean, could I come home when I wanted to?”
What I wanted to ask was, could I come home if I
needed
to. If Hy-Lo hurt Delia real bad and I needed to stand up in court as a witness to past assaults. If I needed to come home and be with her in the hospital to make sure the nurses were treating her well, keeping the life support unit well-oiled and working.
Mable knew what I meant and nodded her head yes.
“Sure. Of course, Kenzie.”
We looked through the book for a long time, folding the corners of pages that held schools that looked interesting to me. Folding the corners of pages that held schools that would not place me too far away from home.
There were applications to be filed, fees to be paid. Who would help me do that, who would pay the fees? Better yet, who was going to pay the $5,000-a-year tuition costs?
“You’re going to apply for every scholarship ever created. Sam will help you write the essays. We’ll pay for the application fees. Don’t worry, you’ll get in and won’t have to pay a dime. You’re a smart girl, Kenzie.”
Our plan became like
Mission Impossible:
scary and exciting all at the same time. I spent most of my weekends with Mable. Delia was there too, but she was mostly curled up on the couch staring at the television, regaining her strength for Monday through Friday.
Mable, Sam, and I would sit for hours, huddled over school and scholarship applications. I wrote so many essays that I developed writer’s cramp in my hand and had to soak it for hours in warm water and Epsom salts.
Mable wrote check after check for application fees and kept a book of stamps handy for my sole use.
“He’ll never go for this, Grandma,” I said one day after I had licked the tenth envelope and sealed it shut with a smooth movement across the flap.
The winter sun was setting, selfishly taking with it the meager warmth it had offered during the day. January wind howled outside the window and beat visciously at the sides of the house, offering me little comfort that I would ever see the bright warmth of spring.
Mable glanced down at me, her first grandchild, who looked so much like her only child, and her heart must have thumped hard in her chest. I saw the pity that welled up in her as she gazed into my eyes. There was no light left there. Her hands moved to my face and traveled lovingly over my hollowed cheeks.
“Don’t worry about that.” Her voice was sad. And I could tell that even with all of our planning, scheming, and plotting, she did not have a clue as to how she would convince Hy-Lo to let me go away to school. “Don’t you worry,” she repeated and then turned to leave. She walked away slowly, her age suddenly wearing down on her.
That night I lay down in my bed and listened to the cold winter wind rattle my bedroom window, not knowing that a solution to my problem was just a few days away.
“You have some mail here, Kenzie.” Mable’s voice was an excited whisper.
I pressed the receiver closer to my face. “From one of the schools?” I asked in the same whisper.
“Uh-huh,” she replied. I could hear the sound of the envelope as she turned it around and around in her hands.
“Will you bring it?” I asked and looked over my shoulder to see if anyone had snuck up behind me.
“Tomorrow,” Mable replied, and then came the soft click of the line as she hung up.
It was a warm Saturday evening, warm for early April. The winter hibernation was coming to an end and the streets started to come alive again with the sounds of playing children, laughter, and adults leaning out their windows to share gossip with friends.
Hy-Lo had been in and out of the apartment for most of the day. He was splitting his time between the men he drank beer with in front of the building and harassing us about the dust on the moldings and the grease that stuck to the wall behind the stove. My hands were wrinkled and raw from the ammonia and water, and by eleven o’clock I had scrubbed the bathroom and kitchen floors until they sparkled against the sunlight.
Malcolm was on his hands and knees plucking at the fine bits of lint that remained lodged in the new carpet that covered the living room. It was dark red and speckled with black. Its presence seemed to soak away that last bit of light Hy-Lo had been unsuccessful at keeping out. Malcolm wheezed and sneezed as he crawled around plucking and pulling at the dirt and dust the vacuum cleaner had missed.
Delia had risen early, dressed, and left the apartment before eight o’clock. I did not hear her moving about, or the soft clinking sound she made with her spoon as she stirred the sugar into her Maxwell House coffee. I did hear the sound of the front door being closed and the clank of the lock when it turned in its metal casing.
My heart sank. This would be the third Saturday in a row Delia would leave Malcolm and me alone to fend for ourselves. When she did come back home, it was usually very late at night, Hy-Lo would be passed out on the living room floor, and we would be in bed or getting ready to go to bed. Delia would come in and step over him as if he were a piece of dog shit on the sidewalk. She did not offer an explanation as to where she had been even if we asked, and we didn’t bother to ask anymore.