Читать книгу Speaking of Summer - Kalisha Buckhanon - Страница 13

TWO

I walked home slower this time, my body loaded with some regret. I had wanted to tell the detective all I could to help us, but I was cautious with my trust. Strangers preferred to discredit one another than expand to new people to sacrifice their time to.

At home I checked the mail, in hopes Summer sent a carrier pigeon. She did not. A big check was too much to expect, though a few enterprises owed me small ones for work on their websites and steadily unnecessary paper marketing. I was a Big Apple “slasher” with a grab bag of media and communications talents in a gig economy, beat up by computerized resume readers and even video auditions to interview for some real jobs, now a find as preposterous as a pot at the end of a rainbow. In the best of times, it was a feat to stay disciplined and entrepreneurial. In the last year, with Mama’s care and then her death, followed by my sister’s vanishing act, I lost spunk to promote myself online and network to new clients cutting out full-time employees.

I left behind the only things in the box: bills and junk with my name on it. I ran my fingers along my mailing label, and scratched the space where now only my name was listed. Autumn Spencer: the last living trace of my parents, Grace and Ricky Spencer.

I felt my father as sporadic warmth and tightness inside my chest. The most I know about him is he loved doing tricks on motorcycles. This killed him right before I carried a metal My Little Pony lunchbox and Rainbow Brite umbrella off to busy, sunny classrooms for the first time. Mama died in my Harlem apartment, after Valentine’s Day, in 2014. A whole year now. She passed in a fog of gentle panic and mental slippage the painkillers toned down. She came to live her last days with us. I was the daughter who insisted on it. Now I know I should have let it be, kept the moment distant and remote.

Before we could even mark the one-year anniversary of our mother’s passing, Summer apparently went to our brownstone’s rooftop and I had not seen her since.

I am thirty-four years old. No children. No nieces or nephews.

I exhausted my IRA. Mama’s life insurance policy paid half its $100,000 after the medical bills and taxes. My “double income” was my sister.

Who will take care of me when I’m old?

I climbed to my hallway, pausing at the few colorful abstracts Summer gifted our environment. I walked up two little steps to the very top of the building. I pulled back the peace-signed sheet across the rooftop doorway. I never liked that door, wood-paneled like a prop of seventies television. I put my palm to it. It was cold. A padlock and chains, screwed in separately from its original construction, were warm. The landlords’ gesture came after Summer stopped letting herself in, stopped greeting them in the foyer, stopped dousing our brownstone in her scents.

Why hadn’t it been there before?

Detective Montgomery brought up an interesting point. I grew up as a twin girl in a house of four women. I learned to leave other women’s shit alone. Women detect disturbance and changes too easily. As Mama hid the severity of her cancer from us, I joined her old maid of honor and her sister to go through the majority of our house on Trummel Lane. Mama was not terminal then; she called it “paring down.” I carted out toys, one too many little rocking horses, nice sweater bundles—all finally passed on to others’ children. I became more disillusioned about her that week than I had in my whole life. I never had any idea she made as many good paintings and as much decent pottery as she did. I felt ashamed I had dismissed how much anonymous creation meant to her, as if it were a tendency she passed on only to Summer. So even in normal times, we live around people and their things but don’t see who those people truly are. It was certainly possible I’d missed a lot while looking through Summer’s things, one eye fixed on the door she could walk through.

I plowed through stockpiled industrial wine and foraged through Summer’s sketchbooks and unpolished artworks. She was enviably neat. My bookshelves strangled the hallways, since I turned out to be the bookish one. Summer’s small contribution was a few heavy books about art and artists whose names I could never pronounce, to spite my education in words. Caravaggio, Frankenthaler, Modigliani, Klimt. The biographies and retrospectives mixed with fine arts and foundation books on color theory, life drawing, and portraiture, so much heavier and more demanding than my grammar manuals, paperback novels, and self-improvement guides. Her notebooks held more doodles than notes. I was the freelance wordsmith she asked to check over the tiniest writings, like her Dear John letters to needy booty calls and her resignation emails to odd jobs. Summer drew versions of herself all her life, leading family and friends to call her recuperative self-portraits “art.” What else were we supposed to say to visions of noose necklaces and self-inflicted stab wounds? Later I helped her submit this stuff to contests and editors who always declined.

The Black and women artists’ catalogs she collected had much to do with the number of times she was tardy with her part of the electric and cable bills. I was fine to tag along to the Bronx Museum, Studio Museum, and tiny eclectic galleries as a spectator; Summer needed to bring the experiences home. Sometimes the books accompanying these shows cost nearly $100, just to sit untouched and tight together like artworks themselves. Basquiat, Ligon, Ringgold, Bearden. It comforted Summer to know people of color broke through the ceilings, wooed patronage, and achieved name status. I flipped down a Kehinde Wiley catalogue. I joined Summer at one of his first shows at Studio Museum, when I’d arrived to New York to escape a certain future writing corporate copy in Chicago.

Summer pasted the book’s receipt on the inside cover of promising portraits that foreshadowed Wiley’s eventual ascension. The pages gave way in the middle and a piece of paper floated to my feet. I leaned down to pick up a Xerox of newsprint, with thick block borders and letters time had deformed into unreadability.

It was an archived feature from The Hedgewood Sentinel, our local paper back home. I was a paper girl for it once, drawn to an entrepreneurial fate and life of words by the time I was in middle school. Then, I got high on the lemony scent of a stack of fresh newspapers. Later, I held off conversion to online news as long as I could.

This article, however, was before my time as a paper girl in Hedgewood. It was also before our family expanded to include Mama’s local star boyfriend, Cole Murphy. Summer cared to dig up in online archives that Mr. Murphy’s resigned from the local NAACP leadership, as the article’s headline and brief story informed me he did. One look at his businessman headshot cornered my memories to childhood, switched from disadvantage to privilege due to money our real father left for a nice house and money a surrogate father brought into that house. I put the article on the pile of filing I needed to finish. It was destined for a manila folder of similar Hedgewood Sentinel keepsakes: our honor roll and graduation listings, annual events we attended, my parents’ obituaries.

It felt spooky to dip my hands into thatched dark bamboo cubes where Summer kept odds and ends in her living room workspace. I remembered her in there, on stained beige sheets, curled cross-legged in the corner or on her stomach. Our candles and incense mostly covered the smells of her pastime: not just paint, but the enamel and glues. I kept her unfinished statement in that space. She shredded fashion brand names and labels she cut from stacks of magazines. She glued them to canvas and spray painted them in light metallic tones. She was just half done on the side where she managed to rubber-cement scraps into texture and grade. It was part of her efforts to join the natural and “meaningful” art crowd, to be more politically and less personally focused, to go the direction the art blogs and dark bar small talk told her to if she wanted notice. I didn’t get it. I liked her less flashy work with faces, as damned and disgruntled as she intended them to be.

“Nobody cares about Black angst anymore, Autumn,” she said about them.

For that acerbic take, I helped her wrap and stack her oil and chalk portraits of imaginary friends. Together, we buried them down in our cellar storage space. It gave me something to do to retrieve them again. She rarely framed. It was too expensive. So I carried the light canvases up a few flights, at night, all by myself. The neighbor boy, from the floor beneath us, helped me once. I was fine alone. But he insisted. He reminded me when young adulthood smelled like red candy, grass, and Vaseline. And not because those were his scents. It was because they were not. Nowadays young people smelled like sour candy, smoke, and electric current. His efforts, and Summer’s laziest paintings, gave me occasion to talk fondly about where I came from.

These makings were nostalgic, juvenile even, as she took subjects like our old backyard shed, and titled it Summer: A fringe of pastel dots along the shed’s bottom border was supposed to be the petunias, marigolds, and geraniums sprouting every year. Autumn could have been mistaken as saturated honey wands bundled together. It was the little-girl view from our bedroom window down onto the front yard every fall, before the gilded boughs of oak trees detassled. Another picture was Grandma’s rocking chair. I recalled it towering to the height of my chest, proud for a mere piece of furniture. Summer rendered it squat and flabby. She painted a mock family portrait of stray cats we used to feed, though I did not recall them in the dull colors she portrayed. So much of her work on our old house was hasty and incorrect, as if she rushed to document the nest before Mama sold it.

Her other artworks were the same unrevealing things, mostly peddled online and at little fairs and to Harlem shop owners, because she couldn’t figure out the people and places and games to leap into real galleries. I gave up on her stuff to go to my photo albums she hated—the cheap sticky plastic-sheet kind. I thumbed through pig-tailed school pictures, shots of frilly dresses at dances. They weren’t fancy art, but I know Summer pulled the albums off my shelf often. She always put them back crooked or out of order. A few really old ones were upside down. I savored those most, because they were filled with my father and his family.

Over the years, we girls became Spencers in name only. Birthday and Christmas presents stopped from my father’s side of the family. They missed our graduations. If Mama didn’t make efforts to take us to see them, we didn’t see them. Summer and I talked often about forcing a relationship with Daddy’s people, all the aunts and uncles and cousins we used to see at the funerals until we stopped flying back home to even see Mama. The money dried up. Our tries at dream jobs demanded us. Time, we thought, was tight. Now, I had regrets. I wanted more heritage in my future.

I went to my desktop to check the train schedules back to my hometown. Fairly straight shots from Penn Station to Chicago’s Union Station, then one short layover until a route would drop me off in back of Hedgewood’s main post office. The ticket price was not high. Perhaps Mama’s death pushed Summer into regret about distance from the Spencers. For all I knew, she was back home. The Big Mamas were feeding her well. She was looking at our baby pictures in their photo albums. She was hearing what our father was like as a child. She was closing that past wound, finding that part of herself, reclaiming a legacy. She was driving past our old house on Trummel Lane, to relive blissful times when the biggest thing we had to manage was time: to rake all the leaves, to dodge every earthworm after a rainstorm, to chase down our school bus filled with pink and yellow faces we never fully fit with.

“But why not do all that with me?” I asked out loud.

The Hedgewood Police Department was little to no help. Summer was not a formal resident there for almost twenty years. We left for college and never looked back for more than holiday visits. We became expatriates and rebels relatives eventually forgot.

House lights, streetlights, and headlights from Harlem’s dense population appeared like iridescent algae through my front windows. I dreamt of the journey, adventure, and escape Summer found. Even when I should have, I never considered leaving New York. Now blocks of darkened houses, low rooftops, and spread-out silence seemed a solution worth fleeing for. I would reach out to family again soon.

By the end of the night, I proved Montgomery and myself wrong. Not one earmarked page of Summer’s books indicated anything but her observations on color, shading, angle, and lines. The occasional biographical tidbit she found interesting, but little more. My sole discovery was a detached eyelash.

Useless memories and thoughts took over too many moments. I could never complete a thing without them. They were my water cooler breaks from hoping, wishing, waiting, and listening for Summer’s key to turn the front door lock. I could not get through a night without believing I heard that sound.

I grabbed a pen to write on my necessary “To Do” list waiting, always, on the kitchen counter. I crossed off the first thing.

1. Look through Summer’s things again.

2. Respond to emails from the precious few clients who are not abandoning me for tardiness, slow response, and my typos in their content.

3. Renew subscriptions to Entertainment Weekly and Writer’s Digest.

4. Go out for toilet paper.

5. Skip the wine tonight.

6. Eat.

I procrastinated on numbers two through six. They weren’t as important as braving to peek more inside Summer beyond what her work showed me, and indeed all of us, for quite a while. We were the ones who chose to think hauntings and disorder were just her chosen “style,” all about art, with no truth in the bones.