“Enough
is enough.” From the back bedroom, the one Nina shares with her sister, their
mother’s harsh reprimand is followed by: “It’s just the dye from the hair
rollers.” Lorna whines, “It was Nina’s idea,” and she is rewarded with: “That
will teach you.” Lorna whimpers something about her ‘perm’ and then yelps, “Ow. You’re hurting me.” Faucets squeal.
“Get in here now. Watch. Don’t stain
the sink.” Rushing water muffles the quarrel between mother and daughter.
Nina
hates Hartford. She hates Connecticut. High school friendships now demolished;
friendships she’d counted on for three years to help her through romantic
crushes, breakups, marriage, babies, or maybe deciding to hell with all that
and striking out on her own. Her entire world had shattered with a terse announcement:
Her father’s business had failed. They were relocating, moving to a new city.
Carping that you had to actually be successful at something before you could
fail at it, her mother only added confusion to Nina’s anguish.
The brief
détente between her and her sister lasted virtually the length of the train
journey from Penn Station in Manhattan to Union Station in Hartford. Nina’s
dogged last-minute resolve was to find adventure in the move, pretend she is a
character in a novel by Willa Cather or Jack Kerouac. Romantic notions were
quickly dispelled on their arrival. The cavernous waiting room reeked of
stationary bums snoring wetly and splayed across long wooden benches. The
downtown area that greeted them was little more than a string of bars and SROs
servicing the more fortunate transients.
She would
be the newcomer in the senior year class at Hartford Public High School.
They had
arrived at the beginning of June. Nina had wasted no time getting a summer job
at a Sage-Allen department store on Main Street. Coming from the High School of
Art & Design seemed to impress them less than the fact that she was handy
with a thinner can and she was hired as an assistant in the art department. The
frizzy-haired head illustrator signaled her needs by shaking a wrist loaded
with bangle bracelets only slightly larger than the hoops in her ears. Nina ran
on cue for coffee, kept the drawing pencils sharpened and flew to the art store
for supplies. Rubber cement fumes did not faze her. They’ve kept her on part time
since the start of classes.
Coming
from a multiracial environment, Hartford High was an eye-opener for Nina who
was not prepared for the segregated feel of the student body. Black students
are bussed in. The white kids voluntarily deck out in madras and chino and are
way more conservative than her father, if that is possible. For the first time
in her life her peers eye her with suspicion. A few in her art class—aspiring
artists both black and white—tease her about her New York accent, goading her
into repeating certain words. She happily complies, dropping the g’s and
exaggerating mutha and fahtha and Noo Yawk. Nina hopes it is good-natured
teasing.
Her
closest friend is the forty-something American Indian guy who works as a stock
boy in the department store. His name is Matoskah and everyone but Nina and his
mother, who is blind, calls him Matt. He is sure Nina has untapped spiritual
power. They talk about art and literature. He introduces her to the art
collection in the Wadsworth Atheneum, an enchanting stone castle at the other
end of Main Street. Nina is told she has a job in the department store, if she
wants, after she graduates. Not a chance in hell, she reckons. She is heading
straight back to New York.
“Because
of these two there’s no time to cook,” Anna huffs. “Whatever you want,” her
husband grumbles. “Chinese, okay? she asks but doesn’t really ask. “Yeah, chow
mein. Go ahead, get the chicken.” Anna stares at her husband until he looks up
from his newspaper, unfolds his wallet, and hands her the money. He yells an
afterthought: “Get extra noodles. They never give you enough of the goddamn
things.” Anna lifts the receiver from the wall phone but before she dials she
trains a hard look on Nina. “Feet off the chair. We’re not animals.”
Nina
hates her mother’s pretensions. They had come from a housing project on the
lower east side of Manhattan and landed in an even more nondescript dump here
on Laurel Street. Stately Victorian houses, their slightly careworn grandeur
undiminished from neglect, are set back from the street on uneven lawns, rising
over a street marred further by two identical bunkers squatting side by side
like unwelcome poorer relations. The new two-story dwellings are devoid of
ornamentation and though Nina’s family was the first to tenant their apartment,
the place already has the air of defeat. In six months the uninspired flesh-colored synthetic carpeting throughout the stingy rooms still gives off a
slightly toxic smell when a vacuum is run over it. Nina had been thrilled, at
first, to be in such close proximity to the charmingly unaffected cottage of
Harriet Beecher Stowe and the much more opulent mansion on Farmington Avenue
where Mark Twain had lived. But the grander dwellings underscore her meaner
abode.
If Nina
thought nobody would ever find them in a place like Hartford, she was proved
wrong. A few weeks before when they had been expecting Chinese food, two army guys had appeared at their door in
uniforms different to the ones she recognized on the boys back home who’d
enlisted. These men wore armbands, metal helmets—and more ominously—holstered
guns. They were looking for Robert Alphonsus Kelly. Nina called her father. It
took her a moment to realize they were talking about her Uncle Bobby. She never
knew his middle name and no one ever called him Robert.
William had yelled for his wife.
“Anna, it’s about your goddamned brother.”
Anna had
spoken quietly with the officers. No, she had not seen her brother in quite
some time. Certainly not since they left New York. Oh, they have already been
to see her mother in Astoria? Any other relatives, they’d inquired. Well, a
sister in Buffalo, she offered, but she is not sure of an address because she’s
moved a lot. Apologizing, she said she doesn’t think she can be any more help.
And promising to alert them if her brother makes contact she said good night.
“Well,
I’ll be damned,” Anna had sighed, under her breath. Over sweating cartons of
spare ribs and slithery mounds of chop suey Nina had assumed her parents would
trade familiar barbs. Her father had only managed, “I’ll just say I told you so,”
before her mother cautioned, “Don’t start.” The usual litany went unsung that
night: that his family was a ludicrous bunch of highfaluting holier-than-thou
born again liars and hypocrites; that hers were drunks and thieves who dumped
their own children. Nina had taken the opportunity of a rare ceasefire to ask
about her uncle’s middle name, Alphonsus. “Not now,” her mother had responded,
less sharply than usual.
Tonight,
after an unusually quiet Chinese meal, perhaps tempered by Lorna’s sulk under a
terry cloth turban, they quickly head for after dinner posts. Anna retires to
the bathroom for a soak to calm her nerves. The slam of the back bedroom door
reminds everyone that Lorna is still pissed off. Nina returns to her magazine
and settles onto the sofa, relinquishing the chair to her father. The smell of
Chinese food never entirely disappears.
Nina and
her sister are the result of an unfortunate post-war coupling. Her dad’s family
is a bunch of Bible thumping
hypocrites. Nina’s two boy cousins, brothers suffering their homosexuality in a
kind of open secret—one of whom she adores—can attest to that. Her maternal
grandmother did give up two of her
children. Bobby and his younger sister Lorrie Jean were dropped into the
custodial arms of the state when they were little kids. Her mother, Anna, is
the oldest and so was kept at home to earn a living. Nina remembers her mother
taking them on interminably long journeys requiring multiple transfers from
subways to busses to visit the ‘goddamn orphanage’, as her father called the
place, which was somewhere in the Bronx. Lorrie Jean always looked clean and
neatly dressed at the Catholic Protectory. The girls made their own uniforms.
Rows of little beds lined a great room. The boys were housed separately and
Nina does not recall having ever seen Bobby during those years, probably
because of some trouble he’d been in. He was a street-wise scrapper with a
wide, bad boy grin, a pug Irish nose, and hair as rebellious as he was. When
they last saw him in Nana’s kitchen, which always smelled of boiled cabbage and
her second husband Harold, he looked like a changed man dressed by the army, his
head cleanly shaved.
Nina
thumbs idly through her magazine, keeping half an eye on My Favorite Martian. Her father is absorbed with Uncle Martin’s
hysteria over the disappearance of his spaceship. Nina wishes she could play
her Bob Dylan album. She doesn’t have her own record player and the stereo in
the living room is off limits when her father is home. Only once did she dip
into her summer earnings and that was to purchase that album to replace the
first copy. Her father had taken a hate on the frizzy-haired folksinger,
calling him that mumbling moron. Adding insult to injury, she’d had to endure her
father’s exaggerated nasal whine for weeks in an outlandish imitation of the
singer. Back in New York the Beatles were causing mayhem among her old school
friends, especially the girls. She preferred Bob Dylan’s protest, and songs
about poor girls sung by Otis Redding. Her regard for the Beatles went up a few
notches when her father first became aware of them and announced that they
looked like goddamn idiots.
The face
on the cover of Seventeen Magazine
reflects Nina’s own shoulder length hair, bangs brushing her eyelashes. The
model is wearing a white silk dress with forest green velvet lapels. It’s
something Nina’s ex-boyfriend would have liked, especially the bosom-cleaving
ridiculous pink rose. His controlling reach stretched all the way to Hartford
and Nina had finally had enough. He was an Irish Catholic private school boy.
His family—his mother—looked down on girls from the projects, thought they were
fast. And Nina was fast. Recently she’d dumped a construction worker she met at
the soda fountain in the drugstore on Asylum she’d stop into for a cherry coke
after work. He was slightly older than boys she knew. You could tell right off
that he made his living with his strength. Shirtless, his tight chest beamed like
a streetlight between his darkly tanned neck and forearms. The musky scent of Jade East lingered on her fingertips and
clothes long after they had kissed good night.
He had been showing off downtown Hartford’s claim to fame, as he put it. The glass building
called ‘The Boat’ was the abstract element in the insurance capital’s stolidly
conservative canvas but Nina was hardly bowled over. At the joyless shopping
mall on Constitution Plaza they'd run into a classmate from her art class. The
moment she'd seen the hard body stiffen, his hand left limp at his side and
ignoring her classmate’s proffered handshake, Nina’s discomfort had grown like a
plague of red algae across her wet brow and she’d scuttled like a plover from
the tidal shift in her classmate’s pained expression. She’d momentarily
contemplated trying to change the guy’s mind about black people, convince him
racism was an ugly thing. But halfway through the groping session that had followed
behind the fountain in Pope Park, after making sure he was paying attention,
she rose abruptly and left him to his limp injustice.
Tossing
the magazine aside, Nina concentrates on the television screen. Candy, the
newlywed next door, has been passing her subscription along to Nina. The
woman’s perkiness belies the fact that she is at least ten years past
seventeen. But with that favor came unwanted advice like proper bra fit and
personal hygiene, which creeped Nina out. Please God, Nina prays, make sure the
times they really are a-changin’.
When the
doorbell chimes Nina and her father jump in unison. William yells for his wife
to get the door and then sensing the late hour, grudgingly rises from his
chair.
He peers
through the peephole. “What the…?”
Thinking
it can only be Candy Nina hesitates quickly before deciding the chatty neighbor
is a better bet than the purple-haired gorgon in the back bedroom. Her mother
is already at the door in the faded pink quilted robe that comes to her knees. Her
father shakes his head as he makes his way back to the kitchen table. The look
on his face causes Nina to investigate. She recognizes Uncle Bobby’s urban
twang before she can peer from behind her mother. “Sissy,” he laughs nervously,
“Long time, no see. Can you give your little brother a hug?” When he leans into
the doorway Lorna sees a fully made up man in a clown suit stained with what
looks like coffee. White greasepaint cakes over his face like a drought-ridden
playa. A red bulb has begun to separate from his nose. More
greasepaint—blue—forms an uneven ring around his mouth, like a bruise. He is
wearing army boots and when he is fully into the room, Nina can see the
bedraggled costume split at the back, revealing army fatigues.
“I’ve got
to hide, er, hang. Hey Nina! How’s my
favorite niece?”
Lorna has
quietly joined them at the door. Her hair is still undercover, the towel pulled
even more tightly. Lorna stands mute and keenly watchful.
Bobby
effortlessly skirts his sister’s interrogation. He only halts a fantastical
narrative when Anna interrupts to tell him the military police had been by a
few weeks before. Yes, of course they were looking for him.
“So,
Sissy. I’m kinda in a jam here, ya see?”
Anna’s
fingers explore the pockets in her robe, searching for the crumpled tissue she
will tear to bits. He indicates the sofa. She tells him it’s not a sleeper. He
fakes a nonchalant trip onto the sofa and runs his hand along the bottom. He
looks up at Anna expectantly with just the slightest evidence of a challenge.
“It’s an old sofa, the springs are gone,” she says evenly. “I don’t mind,
Sissy, you know me I can sleep anywhere.” “No,” she insists. His eyes scan the
room as if he can see the smell of Chinese food. Anna tells her brother to go
into the kitchen. She can heat leftovers but then he will have to go. “Thanks,
Sissy,” he says clearly not yet defeated. And then hoping for an ally he quips
to his brother-in-law, “She still ain’t no genius in the kitchen, eh?”
Nina has
caught her father’s eye. If she can’t distract herself she will be helpless
with laughter. “Mom, Uncle Bobby can have my bed. I’ll sleep on the sofa for a
while. You know until he can—?”
“Out of
the question,” her mother barks. They all look at Lorna, expecting an added
rebuke as she would be the one to have to share her room with this grown up
uncle, this fugitive. “Whadya say
Peanut?” Uncle Bobby clips her chin gently. Lorna stares, still silent. “That’s
not really appropriate,” Anna says less harshly. “What will the neighbors
think?”
Finally
unable to contain themselves Nina and her father release a barrage of pent up
guffaws that echo around the kitchen like chestnuts exploding from an ill
advised roast in the oven, laughing so hard that tears rim their eyes to
overflow. Bobby laughs along, hesitantly at first, until Anna joins in,
helpless as Lorna watches. She pouts. She narrows her gaze and puts both hands
to her terrycloth turban.
Laughter quickens
like a circus ring overrun with midget clowns when Lorna tugs the towel from
her head. She fingers her crimped locks, now faintly purple at the tips. “Mommy,
you gotta let him stay.” Anna starts to protest but Lorna turns a hard stare on
Nina. “She can sleep out here.” Without looking at her mother she says, “He’s
your little brother.” Clutching her uncle’s hand she leads him from the room.
