The Summer We Got Free (25 page)

Regina started
to say something, then shook her head and left the room, looking frustrated.
George went back to his paper. A few minutes later, Geo and Kenny came through
the front door, in their swim trunks, their hair still wet with harsh,
chlorine-smelling water.

“How was the
pool?” George asked.

“I learned to
swim, Daddy,” Geo said, grinning, proud.

“What you mean,
swim?” George asked, chuckling. “You mean walk around in the shallow end?”

Geo laughed,
too. “No, I mean
swim
. David was
there, and he taught some of us how. He learned at the Y last summer, I guess.
You know David, Uncle Chuck’s son?”

George nodded.
His kids still called Chuck “uncle” even though he hadn’t been a
close friend of the family in years.
It had just stuck. He frowned,
tried to push Chuck out of his mind. “You learn how to swim, too, Kenny?”

“
Naw
, he learned how to
sink
,
though,” Geo said.

Kenny jumped on
Geo, put him a headlock. Geo put his arms around Kenny’s waist and lifted him
off the floor. They
were both
laughing, their skinny,
naked arms and chests pressing damply together. George felt a sudden rush of
nausea and heat and he sprang up from his chair and grabbed Geo, prying him off
of Kenny. “Stop acting like a little faggot!” he snarled, his teeth clenched,
shaking the boy. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Geo stared
wide-eyed at his father, blinking, confused. Kenny looked down at his feet,
embarrassment bleeding into his face and neck.

Regina rushed in
from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, looking anxious. She looked
from Geo to George. “What’s going on in here?”

Geo shook his
head. “We didn’t do
nothing, Mama.
We was just
wrassling
. We didn’t mean
nothing.
”

Kenny shook his
head, too, still staring at the floor.

Regina peered at
George. “Let him go.”

George glared at
her. “Don’t tell me what to do about my own goddamn son! You the reason he so
soft in the first place! He
need
to start acting like
a man!”

“He aint a man!”
Regina screamed. She put her arms around Geo and pulled him away from George.
“He twelve years old! You the one need to start acting like a
man
.”

The heat that
had filled George boiled in him now. He turned Geo loose and raised his fist.

Geo screamed, “Daddy, no!”

George slammed his
fist into Regina’s face, making a sound like bat against a ball, and she
stumbled back,
then
dropped to the floor. Geo crouched
down next to her, shielded her with his body, protecting her.

Kenny just stood there, trembling
,
looking too scared to move
.

George looked down at Regina. Her lip was busted,
bleeding. He felt the heat inside him boiling over. He couldn’t breathe. He
needed to get out of there. He turned and moved by them, walked toward the
front door, and behind him he heard a shuffling of feet. He turned around, just
as Regina swung a table lamp and smashed it against his head. The pain seared
through him, and spots appeared before his eyes. He felt himself falling, but
didn’t feel it when he hit the ground.

 
A full
month after he had taken her paints away, George walked past Ava’s room and,
through the open door, saw her sitting on the floor beside her bed with blood
dripping down her arm onto the wood floor. He rushed to her side. She was
peaked and shaken.

“What did you do?” he asked her.

“I was just trying to get some red,” she said.

She had been trying to get some red with a steak knife
across her forearm, and had nicked a vein. George cleaned the small wound and
dressed it, thinking all the time how everything always seemed to be spinning
out of control lately. It had been a week since his fight with Regina and in
that time their physical wounds had nearly healed, but the emotional wounds
that had caused them had only opened wider. Now here again was more of their
own blood dripping on the floor.

“It looks like paint drops,” Ava said, eyeing the beads
of dark red.

George sighed. “Why can’t you just be like normal
people?” he asked her, and he could hear pain in his own voice, and fear.

She shrugged. “This is how I am.”

George shook his head. She didn’t understand. She
never did, no matter how hard he tried to make her see. “One day you gone piss
off the wrong person, Ava,” he said, wrapping a bandage around her arm, as
tenderly as he could. “It’s crazy people in this world.”

1976

T
hunder rumbled
the next evening and lightning cracked open the sky. Rain fell in fat drops,
like gumballs from a broken candy machine, round and dense, making plunking
sounds against concrete and
window panes
. With the
storm came a much-prayed-for break in the heat, and Regina decided she would
take the opportunity to cook a real meal for the first time in days. When she
went to the kitchen, she found Helena there, cooking pork chops and potatoes. “Look
like we had the same idea,” Regina said.

Helena nodded.
“Great minds.” Then, “Oh! I almost forgot!” She hurried out of the kitchen,
into the dining room, and she returned a few moments later, carrying her
drawing pad, flipping it open. “I’ve been meaning to show you this,” she said.
“I finished it a few days ago.” She held out the completed sketch of Regina.

Regina gasped
when she saw it.

“What’s wrong?”
Helena asked, looking disappointed. “You don’t like it?”

“That aint it,”
Regina said, staring at the drawing. “I just didn’t know I looked like that. Is
that how I look to you?”

Helena hesitated.
Then nodded. “Well…yes.”

Regina stared
down at the drawing. It was
well-done
, and looked very
much like her, but there was a hardness in the eyes, and an anger in the set of
the mouth that made her look sick and mean.

“I’m sorry,”
Helena said. “Maybe I didn’t get it right.”

Regina put a
hand on her arm. “No, you did a good job. You did just fine. I’m just
preoccupied about dinner, that’s all.”

Regina prepared the broccoli Helena had bought. Ava,
Paul and Sarah all got home in the next little while, and when dinner was ready
they all sat down to eat. Soon, George arrived, and joined them. Across the
table, Regina saw him eyeing Helena. Whenever Helena spoke, he found something
to disagree with her about.

“This weather is
a mess,” Paul said. “If it aint a thousand degrees, it’s pouring rain.”

“Thunderstorms
are what I love most about summer,” Helena said.

George frowned. “I
hate them. They make the humidity even worse.”

“These greens are wonderful, Mrs. Delaney,” Helena
said.

George shook his
head. “They too salty.”

Regina rolled
here eyes. “You eating them fast enough.”

Sarah ate her
food in silence. She had not told Ava or Helena about the fire-eating man,
about turning her lie into the truth, when she’d gotten home from work the previous
day, because coming up the street, coming up to Fifty-Ninth, she had seen them up
ahead, had seen Goode

pointing
at Ava and hollering. She had stood back and watched,
and when she saw Helena stop and confront the pastor on Ava’s behalf, she knew
that the fire-eating man, and the lie that had become the truth, didn’t matter
anymore. Helena was Ava’s now. Just like Kenny.

“Sarah, why you
so quiet?” Regina asked.

She shrugged. “I
aint got nothing to say. I probably won’t have
nothing
to say ever again.”

George raised
his eyebrows. “What’s wrong now?
Wait
,
let me guess
. It got something to do with
that one
,” he said, pointing a steady
finger at Helena.

“Pop—”

“Don’t ‘
Pop
’ me,” George said. “I want to know how much longer your
sister gone be here.”

“Daddy!” Ava
said. “Don’t be so rude!”

“Maybe I should
go,” Helena said, standing.

“Sit down!” Ava
and Regina said in unison.

Helena sat.

Regina leaned
forward in her chair. “Why you want her gone so bad, George? Hmm? What she
doing that got your drawers in a bunch all the time? I don’t see her doing
nothing but helping with the cooking, the cleaning—”

“And meddling!”

“It’s not my
intention to—”

“Pop, she aint
doing nothing but—”

“She causing
trouble, and you know it! All y’all know it! Y’all just rather let it happen
than agree with me about anything.”

“Causing trouble
how?” Ava asked.

“Asking all
these questions. Bringing up all these bad feelings!”

“Look, George,” Regina said, standing up.
“I made an
agreement with myself a long time ago not to ask you certain
questions
. But I can’t, and I won’t, try
to stop anybody else from asking.”

A hush fell over
the table. A shadow passed over George’s face. “What that supposed to mean,
Regina?”

Regina shook her
head. She was tired of this.
Real tired.
“You want me
to say what it mean?”

George’s throat
felt suddenly very dry, but he didn’t want to swallow and show any sign of
weakness or guilt. He opened his mouth to say something, but his voice cracked.
He felt shame cut him open and slip inside him like a greasy hand, taking hold
of his liver.

“That’s what you
want, George?” Regina asked, glaring at him across the table, “‘Cause I can do
that.”

“What are you
talking about, Mama?” Sarah asked.

“She talking the
same crazy shit she always talking!” George said. “You decided one Saturday a
week aint enough time to fit in all your ranting and raving, Regina?”

“I heard Chuck
came by,” Regina said, her voice calm, steady, anything but
crazy-sounding
.

George felt his shame
giving way to rage and he clenched his teeth and growled at her, “I hate you.
With all my might I wish you would die, right here at this table.”

Ava said, “That’s
enough, Daddy.”

“I wish you would keel over into those pork chops and
suffocate in that gravy,” he said, and the image flashed in his mind, causing a
grin to spread across his face.

Ava felt something swelling up inside her, heaving,
and she was suddenly overcome with rage, white-hot and overpowering. “I said
that’s enough!” she screamed.

“Ava,” Paul said, reaching out and putting his hand on
her arm.

She jerked away
from him, angry, and stood up, still holding her knife and fork, glaring at her
father.

He pointed his
finger at her now. “Don’t talk to me like that! I’m the head of this family!”

“You’re not the
head of this family. You never were,” Ava said, and she was vaguely aware of an
urge inside herself to reach over and grab her father, as he sat there looking
defiant, and to press the knife that she was only half aware of holding into
the soft flesh of his throat. “You kept yourself shut off from us all our lives.
We don’t even know you!” There was a raging inside her. Colors flashed before
her eyes. She did not understand the fury, did not really know the source of
it, but for a moment it had complete control of her, and her fist clenched
around the knife, which felt heavy and purposeful, as the fork in her other
hand dropped onto the table with a loud clang. Everything hushed. She was aware
of people’s mouths moving, but she could not hear what they were saying. Her
father was sitting right beside her. She had only to lift the knife and in one
movement, the narrow-minded, hypocritical fool would be dead. She closed her
eyes. She did not want to kill her father. And yet she did want to kill him.

She felt a hand
on her arm, close to her wrist, and a gentle touch. She opened her eyes and saw
Helena standing beside her, her green eyes searching Ava’s. The flashing colors
stopped and the hush that had fallen over everything lifted.

Her father was
staring up at her with fear and confusion in his face. “What the hell is wrong
with you, Ava?”

It was only then
that she realized she had raised the knife and was holding it inches from his
face. She lowered her arm and placed the knife on the table. Then she moved
away from the table, so quickly that her chair fell over and banged hard
against the linoleum. She saw Sarah jump, and put her hand over her mouth. Ava
turned and ran from the room.

George fled, too. Angry and humiliated, he left the
house in a blur of cussing, hurrying up Radnor Street and away from his house
and his family as fast as he could, like a grenade trying not to go off where
people were gathered. The rain had stopped, but the air was heavy like cream,
sticky on his skin, oppressive, and he longed for that summer to end, for
Helena to leave and things to go back to normal, or whatever had passed for
normal before she had come. What had happened at the table was her fault. It
was her questions that had brought all these bad things to the surface again.

He walked faster,
eastward first,
then
cut over to Walnut, then Spruce.
The rain had washed the streets cleaner, but not clean, never clean, the trash
and grime of the city clinging evermore to the pavements and gutters. He hated
this filthy city. He always had. He had come here because he could no longer
stand the south and he believed he could never have any kind of real life
there. Here, in Philadelphia, he had done
alright
for
himself, better, he knew, than he would have been able to do down there. But he
had never loved this place, had found little beauty in it, and nothing compared
to the forests and open skies of Georgia, where he had learned what beauty was,
what nature could do if left alone to flourish. Yet, he had never gone back to
visit. Not once. He had left his home and never looked back.

He found himself
on Baltimore Avenue, way south, and heading east again, not really thinking
about where he was going until he looked up and saw the street sign for Fifty-First.
He was at the corner of Chuck’s block. He looked down the street, with its
tall, narrow houses, and frowned to himself. This was the last place he needed
to be. Still, he kept walking, and when he approached the house where Chuck and
Lena lived, he slowed down, and peered at it from across the street. The front
door was open, and through the screen door he could see lights on inside. He
wondered what Chuck was doing and, for a moment, he thought about knocking on
the door. He knew he couldn’t. A moment later, the screen door swung open, and
Chuck, Lena, and another man came out onto the porch. The other man was tall,
and much younger than
Chuck
, and George recognized
their son, David. He watched as David hugged his father, holding the embrace
for a long moment as they laughed over each other’s shoulders, sharing some
joke George could not hear. As he watched, the scene changed before his eyes,
and instead of David on the porch, he saw George Jr. as a grown-up man, tall
and strong, and laughing, with his arms around his own father, around George
himself, who held his son tightly to him.

Tears welled in
George’s eyes. He wished he could go back. He wished he could change it, all of
it. He wished he could see his boy again and love him better.

When the embrace between Chuck and David was broken,
the two men became themselves again, the image of Geo disappearing on the
sticky air. George watched them for another moment, and then walked on by.

Helena found Ava sitting on the floor in her bedroom,
at the foot of the bed, with her head back against the footboard, her knees
pulled up to her chin. She came in and sat down beside her, her longer legs
stretched out in front of her. She didn’t say anything, just sat there, with
her head back, too, staring up at the ceiling.

“I’m tired of this,” Ava said. “I’m tired of these
flashes. Of these emotions I can’t control. I need to understand what’s
happening to me.”

“How can I help
you do that?”

Ava shook her
head. “I don’t know.” She got up and paced the floor, from the bed to the door,
to the window, and around again. Though the rage from a few minutes ago had
gone, other things still churned inside her, like an ever-threatening storm.
She knew she could not go on like this. She knew she would go insane, if she
wasn’t
already.

“Your mother
told me you used to paint every day when you were young,” Helena said. “What
happened to all of them?”

“Most of them
got burned,” Ava told her.

“Burned? How?”

“It was years
ago. I was taking them outside so they could get hauled off to the dump. They
were out on the porch. Dexter
Liddy
climbed over the
railing and threw a lit match on them.”

“That’s
horrible.”

“They were headed for the dump anyway,” Ava said.

“Why were you
throwing them out?”

“They were
taking up too much space. I didn’t care about them, so I was throwing them
out.”

Helena frowned.
“You said ‘most’ of them were burned.”

Ava nodded. “A
lot of them I hadn’t brought outside yet.”

“You took those
to the dump?”

“No. After the
first pile got burned, Mama and Mr.
Liddy
got into a
shouting match. After that she made me keep the rest. They’re still down in the
cellar.”

“When’s the last
time you looked at them?” Helena asked. “That day?”

“I didn’t even
really look at them that day.”

Helena stood up.
“Let’s look at them now.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,”
she said. “Maybe seeing your paintings, and remembering what you felt when you
made them, will bring it all together again.”

The cellar was cooler than the rest of the house by
several degrees and it smelled of damp earth and old wood. They moved past
broken furniture and trunks spilling out old things and came to a closet beneath
the stairs. Ava opened it and tugged a string hanging down from the ceiling,
and a light bulb burned on.

The whole closet
was full of paintings. Dozens of them, all stacked in piles.

Helena reached
in and grabbed one from the nearest stack, a
one foot
by one foot square of canvas affixed to a wooden framework. She held it up to
the light. It showed people at an outside gathering on a city street, eating
and laughing, calling out and waving to each other across porches, and playing
double Dutch and ball games in the street. On one end of the block, the heavy
trees of a park reached over into frame and, at the other end, a church stood,
stone gray and
solid-looking
. In the background, row
houses loomed in strange angles that jutted forward, so they, along with the
church and the park, seemed to surround the people on all sides and almost
extend out from the canvas.

“It’s amazing,”
Helena said. “It feels like being on a city street, looking up and around and
seeing almost nothing but buildings, nothing but bricks.”

Ava stared down
at the painting. There was a confined feeling to it, with the park and the
church holding everything in. But the people seemed unaware of being trapped,
the language of their bodies loose and open, their arms extended in greetings
to one another, their laughter almost audible off the canvas.

Helena held up
another painting, this one of George with a beak for a nose. She stared at it,
her face flushed with wonder. She held up a third painting, a self-portrait of
Ava as a young girl, stark naked and holding a
red-dripping
paint brush. The colors, like in all the paintings, Ava thought, were
well-chosen
. There was
a lushness
,
a density of pigment, that pleased the eye. And, too, there was
a quirkiness
about the paintings, an
underhint
of humor alongside some trouble or grief. All of them were like that.
Strange and bold and flushed with color.

“Why did you
stop?” Helen asked her.

“I don’t
remember why.”