novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- there's no place like home I don't know how to tell you this story, but it feels important, so I am going to try. Dorothy lived on the corner of Magee and Harbor View avenues in Oakland's slowly gentrifying Laurel District. Jeannie consulted her directions nervously, sweltering in her car, annoyed by her own handwriting. She was looking for the house on the corner, the one with the red door. She steered The Blue Danube, her hulking station wagon, right off 35th and onto Harbor View, rattling past a gaggle of swaggering, large, angrily uniformed school kids who gave the Danube its requisite once-over, due to its loudness and largesse. Jeannie was two years older than her Mercedes diesel station wagon, which meant the car was twenty-eight and three decades outmoded. Cars these days were small, deathly quiet, and probably not even made of steel. They didn't even smell. She felt a flash of anger herself as she passed the surly twelve year olds, as if she were done up in a girdle and hoop skirt, surrounded by skinny jeans. Jeannie couldn't figure out why Harbor View was given its name: you couldn't see any scrap of ocean from this divot of Oakland's topography, shoved as it was against the foothills. In order to see the bay, you had to drive farther up 35th, and the farther you drove the grander the houses, their faces wide and angled, aspiring towards San Francisco. Jeannie found the red door and parked on the street next to the small, unfenced tan house, her car shuddering slowly off, and then the street was quiet again. She wondered if a bay view wasn't unconsciously thwarting, always turned towards the city. The City. Oakland was part of the East Bay, but San Francisco was The City. What line of power did such a gaze speak to? Anyway, Dorothy's address was Magee proper, and when she got inside, Jeannie saw that her view turned out to be directly into neighbors' windows, or the Hawaiian church across the street, if you were in the living room. Dorothy swept Jeannie in, much more animated than Jeannie had ever seen her at work. That, and she was barefoot. She seemed comfortable and playful as opposed to her usual mode of quiet, dry sarcasm. The house felt a lot bigger from the inside, open and Quaker accented, oak and leather furniture. A few prayer rugs. Next to a dusty 1980's push-and-play stereo system stood a sleek brown piano and displayed on it were portraits of Dorothy's family: each parent had their own framed photograph, black and white portraits from the forties (her father, stoic and dapper, with pools for eyes) or the fifties (her mother, in a fox stole and a angled felt hat, quietly tilting her chin upwards). The photograph of her sister was a snapshot Dorothy had obviously taken herself of the two of them, a little red digital date stamped on the lower right corner told Jeannie it was three years old. Jeannie would come back to these photographs later, during her solo archeological skim and she would stare at Dorothy's parents and try not to imagine them as Harlem renaissance artists, which was what they looked like to her, proud and noble and defiant, and black. Jeannie would get mad at herself for equating the pair with Harlem, as if any creative black people from that era had to be from Harlem. The dining table was piled with bills, manuscripts, to-do lists, plane tickets, half-knitted scarves and a laptop. I'll clean all that off before I leave tomorrow, Dorothy said, motioning at the table in passing. She quickly ushered Jeannie in and out of each room, pausing the longest in the bathroom, somehow angling Jeannie's attention towards the new pale blue tile so she could admire Dorothy's ingenuity: smooth stones were caulked into the floor's boarders. Dorothy's bedroom was decorated with two framed LP covers: Minnie Riperton's Adventures in Paradise and Stevie Wonder's Talking Book. Dorothy warned her not to open the closet because she'd piled all of her loose clothes in there. The office was busy, and couldn't decide what it wanted to be: a venetian folding screen stood against the wall opposite her desk, and the walls themselves were peppered with representations of things that Jeannie already knew Dorothy held dear: travel, Africa, writers, other intimate inspirations and sloganistic writerly quotes. Dorothy flew through the kitchen, there it was, yes a kitchen, no big deal but you see I cleaned the floor, this floor has never been this clean, I cleaned it for you because I knew you'd appreciate it, you with the roommates and all, and suddenly they were downstairs in the orange spare bedroom/craft room/storage room/basement, and there was Marble. Jeannie had been expecting some sort of pedigree, or at least a fluffily aloof if not squish-faced cat, but Marble was old, cranky, and tortoise-shelled. Marble was the opposite of all the pets Jeannie had ever sat for, and this both relieved and elated Jeannie: she found she loved Dorothy even more than she already did. Marble did have startlingly blue eyes, her only obvious beauty. In all other respects she was a well-worn stuffed animal, the kind with a voice box installed to moo or chirp, but hers was stuck on yowl. Jeannie shoved her face into the scruff of Marble's neck and rubbed it there, coming away with so much of Marble's fine, scratchy short fur. She ran her hand roughly down Marble's back and watched her butt rise in response. Marble yowl-purred. That's my girl, Dorothy said. And here's the washer and dryer, but don't use the washer because it broke yesterday. They clomped back up the stairs, the three of them, through the kitchen and out the back door and down the back stairs into the yard, all of it garden except a wooden bench on a little brick patio under a tree. I hate that tree, Dorothy said. Marble disappeared promptly. Dorothy's tendrils of attention focused leanly on pruning, replanting, fussing. Jeannie watched her transfer a fragile-looking bulb from one spot to another. People passed by on the sidewalk ten feet away, and Dorothy didn't even look up but her talk turned to the matter of the fence. It'll be installed tomorrow. I've got it all pictured in my mind: I want the fence beams to be horizontal, not vertical, with little spaces between them. Joy-Anne's husband Joe is a genius and he's the one who fixed up the bathroom. Do you see the posts? Jeannie hadn't noticed them before but now she got up and wandered over to them, testing their cement footholds with a toe. Joe says to water them, I don't know why. So when you water, make sure you water the fence posts. She squatted before one of the tin bathtub planters and talked about how plants that you eat need twice as much water as other plants, and how the woman that lived directly behind her was a fireman on vacation, and how the people that lived behind the fireman would break into her yard and hang out there, probably because she was gay and it was some sort of hate thing. Oh, and so-and-so next door was robbed a few days ago. An Asian woman in a minivan pulled up in front of the Danube, idling there. Dorothy kept talking. Jeannie watched the woman watch them, and then one of the angry-looking students climbed into the minivan and it puttered away. An idle student walked directly into the yard as if it was his. This your yard? Dorothy looked up, eyes flat and mean, but didn't stop what she was doing. Yeah, this is my yard. What is your name? He didn't answer at first, but made a beeline for Marble, who had reappeared on the patio furniture. Dorothy had to ask him several times, and finally we found out his name was Stuart. It was like he had no sense of property. 9:04 pm - 10.16.09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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