The Turner House (19 page)

“This is
my
thing, Tina, and you just need to respect that,” Cha-Cha said. He was dressed and gone within five minutes.

Tina and Cha-Cha met the summer of 1971 in Kansas City, where Tina grew up. A short woman, she just made five feet two with the best posture she could muster, and here was Cha-Cha, a six-foot-two trucker from Detroit, hanging around the pharmacy where she cashiered, looming over her, making up excuses to talk to her. The first time he came in was legitimate; he had a toothache and was determined to make his run to Nashville on time, so he needed painkillers.

“This says you shouldn't operate heavy machinery,” Tina warned. His eighteen-wheeler parked on the curb in front of the pharmacy cast a shadow on the entire storefront. The cars on the top deck shone like beetles in the sun.

“I'm from Detroit, miss,” Cha-Cha said. “We learn to operate heavy machinery in grade school.”

Tina laughed, more to encourage Cha-Cha to keep smiling than because she cared for the joke. He was thin back then, unhealthily thin, Tina thought, and she had a desire to feed him. An alien, maternal desire she'd never felt for another person before. It made her afraid. She had looked after her three younger brothers her whole life. She took the job at the pharmacy in hopes of saving up enough money to move out with a girlfriend and take care of no one but herself for a change. Cha-Cha left that afternoon without asking her on a date.

He came back two Saturdays later, then again in another two weeks. Tina thought that Detroit to Nashville was his regular route; she would not know until after they were married and she'd moved up to Detroit that he had begged and bartered with his own father to have the route that summer.

They moved into a two-family flat off of Van Dyke, not far from Yarrow, during the fall of 1972. Cha-Cha was saving furiously for a house, and it took Tina time to find work as a medical transcriber. The neighborhood was just as poor as the one she'd left in Kansas City, but the riots had left it uglier. Charred husks of buildings lined Harper Street, and those businesses that still operated did so halfheartedly, with decreased hours and pitiable attempts to repair their façades.

“It'll be better in the spring,” Cha-Cha reassured her. “The green will help make things look nice.”

Tina didn't have to wait for spring. After the wedding Cha-Cha's sisters pulled her into their ranks, and Tina felt what it was like to be a part of a web of familial love and connections. Weekends were full of birthday celebrations and looking after one another's children. Lelah and Troy were only four and seven when Tina met them.

After Chucky and Todd were born, Cha-Cha became more determined than ever to move out of the neighborhood. The move to the suburbs changed everything for Tina. Just her and her three men, out there in a neighborhood she'd never even had a reason to drive through before, where she'd never felt welcome. Francey and Marlene and Netti and Sandra and Berniece still came by, and she still went to see them, but she was not as “in” as she'd once been, she could feel it. It wasn't even that they felt she looked down on them;
they
looked down on
her
for some reason. As if a big new house in that white neighborhood made her less connected to their children trouble, their man trouble. As if she'd morphed into some type of Stepford wife overnight. She became “my sister-in-law” in introductions, when she'd always just been called a sister, and while her boys and Cha-Cha were still barraged with calls, cakes, and visits on their birthdays, Tina's own birthday mysteriously vanished from folks' calendars. The exception was Lelah, who Tina felt she had helped raise just as much as Viola had, if not more. It was Lelah who told her about any girls' night out lest she not be included. But Lelah, first as a teen, then as a new mother, also depended on Tina for sporadic loans and frequent childcare. She needed Tina more than the others did, had a reason to keep her close.

Just when it felt like the old, suffocating loneliness from Kansas City threatened to smother her, Tina's hairdresser invited her to New Dawn, a church in Southfield with a young pastor and a bevy of ways to get involved. When she talked to prospective members now, Tina liked to say that the Word drew her in, but the people closed the door behind her. She'd found a place. A decade had passed and Cha-Cha still called her involvement a phase. But how else would she have been able to give all that she continuously gave? Organizing quarterly birthday parties for the legion of Turner grandchildren and great-grandchildren, pretending to be just as “in” with the family as always. Her crown would be in heaven.

Tina went to Viola's room with a bowl of oatmeal. She didn't knock. Viola slept on her side facing the far wall. Tina set the oatmeal down on the nightstand and put a hand on the pillow next to Viola's head. The pillowcase was damp, perhaps from sweating, or could it have been from tears? She leaned over and looked at her mother-in-law's face. Without wakefulness to animate it, it was easy to see how this face had made its way into the features of her thirteen children. There were Russell's long eyelashes, Lelah's high forehead, everyone's small nose with its delicately flared nostrils and shallow arch. Cha-Cha's thin lips, the top one just a touch more brown and the bottom more pink. Tina was not blood, she knew, but Lord, how she loved these people! So much sometimes it made her ashamed. They were hers. She didn't let the move to Franklin Village push her out of the family, and she decided she wouldn't let Alice Rothman do it either.

She cracked Viola's window on the way out of the room. Whether she had been crying or sweating, fresh air would do her some good.

C
HA
-C
HA HUSTLED THROUGH
the lobby of Alice's private counseling consortium, into the elevator and out to Alice's floor, past the young female receptionist who never asked him whom he was there to see. He had never shown up unannounced, but it didn't occur to him to wait for Alice to come out of her office. He had forgotten his printouts, and he cursed himself for this mistake. He knocked on her door.

Alice opened it. Her mouth was full of food, her office empty.

“Charles,” she said. “It's lunchtime. What's going on?”

Her standing there, surprised, worried, her hair pulled up into a type of high, fluffy halo that he'd never seen before, made Cha-Cha both regret coming there and desperate to touch her. Just some physical contact to confirm that they were indeed friends. That she would see him through this thing. He hugged her before he could stop himself. A chaste church hug, his pelvis as far away from hers as possible. Alice patted him once on the back but was otherwise still.

“It's alright,” she said. “Please come inside.”

Cha-Cha forgot to drag his customary armchair into the room, and once inside he couldn't bear to walk back outside to get it; he might have lost his nerve and run out of the building. He collapsed onto the fainting couch, let his cane fall to the carpet, and told his story for the third time that day. Unlike with Tina and Viola, he was precise as possible with Alice, preempting questions by including what he had done beforehand (a little haint research, babysat his grandson); what was on his mind right before he went to sleep (the Yarrow house, his grandson's preoccupation with the word
stupid
, an email from Russell announcing another visit); and even what he'd eaten for dinner (hot wings, not as spicy as he would have liked). These details came out in a torrent, and for most of the telling he kept his eyes closed. When he reached the end he looked over at Alice.

“Well,” she said.

“Well?”

Alice spread her fingers out on her desk. She looked exhausted.

“I'm concerned, Charles, if you want to know the honest truth.” She did not blink as she looked at Cha-Cha. Was that fear he saw in her eyes? Or was it just an intense effort to remain detached?

“I feel responsible because I encouraged you to explore this haint situation further.”

“Oh, I don't blame you,” Cha-Cha said. “I know maybe having to remember certain things helped me see it again, but now I'm pretty sure it's always been around.”

“That's the problem, Charles. It was unprofessional of me to allow you to indulge in these hallucinations, but now I think we need to start a more constructive dialogue.”

“Hallucinations? What are you talking about?”

The look he'd seen a minute ago was indeed detachment; that mask of professional indifference that Cha-Cha feared Alice would wear before he even met her. Here it was. It had been underneath the surface of her all along.

“Again, I apologize for not calling them that sooner. You're holding on to these visions, which
are
essentially hallucinations, for a specific reason, and unless we speak about them in the correct terms, I don't think things will improve. There are techniques we can utilize, more direct approaches that I now feel I should have implemented sooner.”

Cha-Cha sat up as straight as possible on the chaise.

“I'm not hallucinating a damn thing!” he said, then, “I'm sorry for raising my voice.”

“It's fine,” Alice said.

“Listen, I had things to show you. I printed out some research I been doing, stuff I found about haints online. A lot are individual testimonies, but they prove that what's happening to me isn't so crazy.”

“Charles, I really am sorry,” Alice said, and she did look pained as she spoke. “But I think it's dangerous to keep discussing this haint as if it's real. It is clearly real to
you
, but the goal has to be to get you to a point where you don't need to believe in it anymore.”

At sixty-four years old, Cha-Cha could count on one hand the number of times he had ever cried. When he was nine and Marlene was a newborn, she'd contracted a kidney infection and Francis sat the children down to tell them she would likely die. Cha-Cha had held the baby girl three, maybe four times, and the only remarkable thing he recalled was her skin; she was the darkest of his siblings yet. The thought of a casket small enough for a baby had made him weep. Quincy, Francey, and Russell had wept as well, but Francis shot Cha-Cha a look across the kitchen table, a look that told him to pull it together and be strong for the younger ones. Cha-Cha cried again in 1973 when Edgar Bullock, his best friend and first roommate, was killed in Vietnam, just days before he was scheduled to come home. The last time Cha-Cha cried was more than thirty years earlier, when Chucky was born. It was the only time out of the three when he hadn't been at all ashamed. If he were younger, perhaps, or the son of another man, Cha-Cha would cry now. At the very least he should leave this woman's office, he thought. Alice suddenly seemed ignorant, and much, much younger than she was. But who to tell next? Where to go with a story this incredible? Cha-Cha searched his mind for the right face and drew a blank.

“Charles?”

He'd been sitting quietly for nearly a minute.

“I understand if you're upset with me,” Alice said.

“Who are you, Alice?”

“Excuse me?”

“Who
are
you? I've been telling you all about myself, my family, hell, even
personal
things about my marriage. I figure I should at least know some basic facts about you before I listen to anything else you have to say.”

Alice straightened up in her seat.

“Me as a person? That's not how this works, Charles.”

“You know what?” Cha-Cha said. “I find it funny that all of a sudden you're all about rules. Few months ago you were
lying
to Chrysler, encouraging my ‘hallucinations.'”

“I've got nothing to explain to you, Charles.”

“No, you don't, because I've got Google like everybody else. I've seen your parents.”

Alice's eyes widened for a moment, then she began straightening the pens on her desk.

“So you've seen my parents. My parents are white. What does that have to do with you and the things you need to work through?”

Cha-Cha stood up to go. Why had he trusted this woman so quickly? Because he was lonely, and because she was beautiful. He could see her beauty even now. It was there in her worried eyes and smooth, nervous hands. In the way her plump lips pulled back tight when she was upset. He'd felt so fortunate to have a young, good-looking woman pay attention to him that he'd never fully analyzed what it meant that she charged him a fee for this attention, and that her reasons for seeing him might differ from his own.

“You damn near seduced me,” he said.

Alice opened her mouth to object, but Cha-Cha continued. “You had me up in here thinking you cared about all of this shit, this stuff going on in my life. Making it seem like this was more than another check for you.”

“Charles, I think you should take a minute to calm down.”

“I couldn't figure what you could possibly want me in here for,” he said. “Not my brilliant conversation, I know that much. I guess you just wanted to know what it was like, huh? To grow up around your own kind. Or maybe just what it was like to grow up black
and
poor.”

“Charles,” Alice said.

“Stop saying my gotdamn name. I'm the only person in here.”

Her nose crinkled up as if she might cry, but the moment quickly passed and her face glazed over with detachment again. Cha-Cha walked toward the door.

“I'm not a lab rat, or some stupid monkey in a cage.”

He shut the door behind him, but he could still hear her say, “I never thought you were,” as he exited the waiting room.

The story of black Detroiters and corned beef is nearly as fraught with racial tension as the story of the Pilgrims and corn. Long before European immigrants gave up fighting to keep the newly arrived black masses from becoming their neighbors, they were working next to them at the plants, distilleries, mines, and government agencies that made the city hum. It was easier to sustain hate for a monolith than to keep hating Earl from two spots down the line (even if you called him Nigger Earl,
Mavro
Earl,
Mulignan
Earl, or some other epithet when he wasn't around), so tenuous friendships were forged and eventually recipes shared. Add to that the scores of blacks working in all manner of domestic and food service in the city, and an unintended result was that the Negro transplant had occasion to pick up new cuts of meat at the butcher. If black folks in the Southwest lay special claim to their own offshoot of Mexican food (and they do; think tamale pies, enchilada casseroles, and the like, all sprinkled with Lawry's, pork added where it wasn't before), then their midwestern cousins maintain a similar toehold in the world of brats, beer, and brisket.