The Best American Short Stories 2018

Carolyn Ferrell A History of China ^{from Ploughshares: Solos Omnibus}

Every year at the family reunion—before Cousin Monique comes to your rescue—the uncles sit back in their folding chairs and napkin-necks and ask about your father. They take you in with age-soggy eyes, as you stand before them in a floppy blouson and skirt. You look different now than you did in 1970 or 1981 or 1997—though you still have what lyrical Aunt Vitrine calls your swan quality. Cousin Monique had wanted to ditch the reunion for the shopping mall in Auntsville; she has always been your wings and, as such, was born to ignore the uncles: in 1970, she set fire to the truck belonging to one uncle and claimed it was lightning; in 1981, she put Ex-Lax in their pound cake frosting. Now she is nowhere to be seen. There’s no reason we can’t have fun at the reunion, you told her the night before, when she picked you up at Raleigh Airport. You’re right, Monique replied, grinning in the dark, the car pulling faster and faster along the blind curves of the road. Slave food and rockheads. I don’t see why that would in any way be an obstacle to fun, cousin.

Your blouson sticks to your skin. The uncles lean forward as if to smell you—girls here only wear that kind of top if they are in trouble—but gradually their eyes drift over the dirt hills across the street, behind the Baptist church. They don’t care if you’re like every other girl down here: fast Monique and her sisters Mae and Wanita and Tarnisha and Lynette. Her cousins Meggie and Mercy and Shawnelle and Winsome. Their kids LaDonna and Kelly and Juan and Quanasia and Cedric and Colin. Tons more. Monique’s mom had given her a fancy name in the hopes that she would be better than the rest. But look what happened, your father once remarked. 1981? 1982?

The uncles want news about him. Word on the road is that their nephew wants to return to his roots in North Carolina. The prodigal son returning—what a laugh, the uncles concur.

You stretch your eyes across the property, exasperating because it is huge and small at the same time and fills you with a familiar hopelessness. Monique and a friend were supposed to meet you at dawn. You all were supposed to slip out of your respective houses (you are staying with Aunt Nephronia, and Monique and Kate are, of course, staying with Monique’s mom, Vitrine, two houses down; as a child, this road of relatives fascinated you)—but you overslept, in part due to the brutally hot North Carolina night, in part due to your tears. Can a dead person ever change? Can time remove a tiger’s stripes? Those foolish questions made you weep in your sleep last night; in the days before your father died, you’d been too stingy to say goodbye.

The uncles look at you and say, Your daddy ain’t set foot here in near twenty years. But tell him we forgive him if he wants.

You need to tell them that he somehow finagled all the land from Great-Grandma Elldine and left it all to you in a will. Something about an unpaid loan, the land not being worth spit. The letter actually read, But why not enjoy it as your own, Sasha Jean. I utterly wish I could give you more.

The uncles are suddenly worked up in clammy anger.

How come he don’t answer when Vitrine call? That ain’t no way to be treating your one sister on this earth!

He always thought he was the best at checkers. Well, he got another thing coming.

If he thinking about parking that damn Cadillac in my yard again, he even crazier.

That sucker!

You’d had a dream, coming back to the folks in North Carolina: that you’d get a chance to talk smoothly after they all finished eating and were in good spirits; that you’d lay out everything Bobby Lee’s scribbled will said, though in reality it was vague, not more than four sentences. The sun wouldn’t be too hot and the children wouldn’t be too unruly. Dogs, as they happened to wander back and forth from each house, would not frighten you with their larva-laden ears. This was your dream. In reality, you can’t recall a single time that the uncles, in their walking days, didn’t eventually get smashed drunk and start fighting with the women. The pig, burnt to a crisp on the outside but pink as a newborn on the inside, would turn your stomach. The same gospel songs would be sung, the same protests as to who would hold the mic, who would gather the children from their hiding places and force them to sing. It’s not Sunday, one of them would say, relenting under a smack upside the head. How could your dream stand up to these details? Your dream was like a story that was told in the pages of some huge, incomprehensible book, spread out on a lemon-wax table in the only good part of someone’s house or trailer. Everyone sensed it was there but knew how to avoid it.

That and still: you want to find the right time to tell them—what better place for sad family news than at a reunion?—and you’re hoping that since it didn’t happen last night (your arrival at Nephronia’s, with glasses of Harveys Bristol Cream) or this morning (gluten-free breakfast crepes—à la the Food Network—with Vitrine), a suitable moment will come today.

Everyone is in the backyard of Grandma Elldine’s decrepit Victorian. Random picnic tables have been set out and on them, flies chill over Tupperwares of mac salad and wings. Curlyhead, feverfew, and false foxglove dot the perimeter but everyone treats them like weeds. Already at eleven in the morning, it is 90 degrees; the relatives fan themselves with their hands until someone drags out a standing General Electric and plugs it (via two extension cords) into an unseen outlet.

I hope my brother don’t think we still in the prehistoric days, Aunt Vitrine had said at the breakfast table, her gray wig toppling. I’m learning to eat healthy, Sasha Jean. Buttermilk, no heavy cream. You go back and tell my brother that for me. We all gone live forever, like it or not.

In reality, it should be easy to tell everyone that your father died (in his armchair, surrounded only by his home healthcare aide and General Hospital playing on the tablet in her hands). Perhaps they will expect you to cry, and then for you to expect them to cry back. Ancient Hattie Mabel carries a mic (via three extension cords) out to the middle of the yard, preparing to gospel. We can forgive, the uncles say. But hell if we can forget.

You are silent; handed a plate of beans and rice by a young boy; pushed into a chair next to the uncles, in direct sunlight. You mention that your daddy plans on coming down to the reunion next year. That he misses everyone and longs for the red earth of his childhood. The uncles raise their brows and laugh. They tell you, don’t lie. Ancient Hattie Mabel removes her hand from your shoulders and starts in with “The Old Rugged Cross.” You notice that she still has on her overnight curlers, that her eyes are closed as she sways from side to side, as if in a godly stew. The fragrance of the beans and rice is heavy for this time of day, but still you lift a fork. The uncles say they’ve never known you to be untrue.

They have heard rumors all these years. Your father, the big gambler, every weekend in Las Vegas, thousands lost. Your father, owner of not one but two homes in Los Angeles. Your father, the lady’s man. He never paid child support. He called himself a minister on his tax forms and got caught by the government people. He tried talking Grandma Elldine into selling him this property just before she went into Pine Haven Home but luckily she resisted his advances. He wanted to tear down the old Victorian the first chance he got.

He got called on by the cops one time for “untoward deviousness.” He never said I’m sorry to anyone like he meant it.

The uncles tell you not to lie. Ain’t no way he’s coming back. Our Bobby Lee is gone for good.

The will—scribbled on a yellow legal pad and witnessed by Faith Akintola, Dept. of Aging Adult Services, Los Angeles County—indicates that you’re supposed to evict them. That you’re supposed to raze everything and then build a real house here, with functioning plumbing and privacy windows. Sit on your newly built porch and look out over the chicken hills across the street and invite loads of educated folks over for drinks and perhaps to hear those “short stories” you’ve been publishing in graduate school—you can read them aloud (that is, your father last said, if they really want to sit around on a firefly night and listen to that crap). You’re supposed to recall childhood summers here, laughing in Great-Grandma Elldine’s post bed with Monique while the other children went to work tobacco. (Why not make a story out of that, he demanded. Monique and her slut self. Lazy, that’s all. Monique’s sisters and their slut selves—chasing men like firehouse dogs. Those girls belonged to nobody and look where that got them. Four kids apiece and no guardian in sight.) You’re supposed to see why he turned out the way he did, and why you will never go down that particular path. Never ever. (You belong to me. My favorite. Forgive me. Forever and ever.)

In 1961, your father stood outside a small white house on a street empty of trees. He was bowing his head, quite uncharacteristic. But his mind went like: Thank you, God, for this is not Carolina red dirt or Carolina sun. Trees can be planted if people need them, and churches can be fucking avoided by simply watching the ball game on TV.

Your father rocked a carriage with one hand while looking over a brochure handed to him by the real estate agent. Pomegranate Estates, it read. Take a Bite of This Fruit.

In 1961, the real estate agent had called this Long Island neighborhood a “colored development,” shying away from words like community or housing project, as he didn’t want your father—already coming across as uppity—to get the wrong idea. These were normal houses for normal people, the agent claimed—some even had wooden shingles. People watered lawns here, drove cars into proper driveways. There would be no fists here, no spirituals or arms linked in arms or fires or Jackson Five records or Aretha Franklin passion in this part of Pomegranate Village. The agent waved his hand over the sea of three-bedroom-plus-den Cape Cods (there were actually thirty-five on this cul-de-sac) and said, If you all want something to do, think about painting the shutters a different color, or planting a little garden or something. No vegetables, no livestock, no front yard clotheslines. Just a row of marigolds or begonias.

Tell your closest friends, the brochure encouraged.

In the yard of your soon-to-be new house, your father ignored the agent. His job at that particular moment was to keep his eye on the carriage in which you lay. The sun beamed straight into your eyes, and you bawled; the carriage was a foot away from a struggling maple sapling, but your father made no attempt to wheel you into that bit of shade. He was, instead, listening for your mother.

Who was walking around the yard, wringing her hands, not believing her luck. Not only did the house have more than one bedroom and a bathtub and basement, it had all this land. Nearly a fifth of an acre. She imagined planting the gooseberries and potatoes she’d smuggled from her last trip home to Laboe. One patch here, another here, near the culvert. There was that annoying maple sapling in the front yard by the curb, but in the backyard, there was nothing. Plenty of room for German food.

In 1971, your mother announced that she hated trees.

You struggle to eat the beans and rice, only to have Aunt Cathy tuck a bowl of grits and eggs into your lap. For later, she says, winking. From the corner of your eye you notice Monique, her brown skin glistening with baby oil, hurrying in a dress and bare feet. There was that one time, in 1981, when she duct-taped shut the door to the church and wouldn’t let them out for over an hour. In 1982, she stole seven dump cakes from the church basement breakfast and threw them into the branches of the tall pines.

She is flying like a pterodactyl now, large brown wings outstretched in love. She is coming for you.

I love it, your mother cried, walking away from the men and the carriage toward the side of the house. There were huge lilac trees and a gutsy chain-link fence running from front to back. When can we move in, she cried, without once turning her head.

Just out of sight of the men, her hands went back into her coat pocket; she, too, began a quiet prayer. The house was a miracle—it would be her miracle. It was close to the others. It looked exactly like the others. Likely, when you opened every door, you saw the same walls, you noticed that the bathroom was in the same place, the kitchen fan made the same noise. But how fantastic was that? No useless standing out or drawing attention to the wrong things. Being the same meant being the same.

Your mother wandered back toward the front yard. I love this place, Bob, she whispered. Please say we never leave.

Elspeth, he murmured. His hand on the carriage, the baby that was you still bawling.

The real estate agent cleared his throat. It was not often that he saw a black man hold a white woman in his arms and live to tell about it. His own family was Connecticut stock by way of Georgia and New Mexico. We’ll take it, your father announced. Bring me the papers.

The agent again looked at him funny; just what did this colored man think, using a phrase like that? Bring me—what was he, the fucking King of Siam?

But still, the agent didn’t resist. That afternoon the three of them sat together in the office on Main Street in Pomegranate Village and signed the papers. In the carriage, you bawled even further.

What your father has left you is a deed to these dusty thirty-seven acres, populated by fallen-down prefabs and trailers, at least seven in total, and at the end of the road, a rusted old church. Faith Akintola sent you a letter with a copy of the signed will you’ve carried in your purse; the letter (dictated, in fact, to the aide during commercials) continued:

Monique is scowling at the uncles. Why you talking to these old skunks? she asks, yanking you toward the road. Her face is riddled with egg white, remnants of an acne cure she’d applied earlier that morning. Unlike almost everyone here, she is as slim as a model. Her skin bakes underneath your hand into pure chocolate custard.

You tell her you were just making small talk.

Small talk, Monique sighs, wincing. Those suckers don’t know nothing about no small talk. Try making BIG talk and see what happens.

Big talk?

They think they doing you a favor when in reality it’s no way to treat a baby girl they supposed to be loving. They think they doing you a favor. I wish I could kill them all.

When you get to the roadside, you vomit in an echinacea bush.

Let it out, don’t be afraid, Monique whispers, lifting your sweaty hair from your shoulder. She giggles, but the pulse of her hand is soothing. You knocked up, Sasha Jean? I would be so happy. You don’t know how long I been waiting to say to you: JOIN THE CLUB.

(Re: the uncles: later she will claim what she was talking about was the time the uncles were asked to watch her oldest daughters—Monique was doing two shifts at Target—but then fell asleep and let the baby girls wander off down the road—almost two miles on their own. She wanted to kick them in the dick, hurt them so they’d stay awake forever, damn stupid talkers.)

What’s going on? Monique asks, as you rest against an oak stump. She smiles. In 1981, she poured sugar in various gas tanks, and then told the uncles it was a case of ornery white men. Girl, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, she whispers, clasping your face between her hands. You attempt to smile an answer, but then the bile comes back up. Monique looks into your eyes, unwavering. Exactly what kind of bun, she asks, do you have in your oven?

There was a story before Long Island. In it, El boarded the plane with the Melitta in her suitcase.

She’d never been on a plane before, had never been spoken to by a stewardess bearing peanuts and napkins, had never left her home in the night like some common criminal. The stewardess brought around a cart of drinks, but El shook her head; all she could think of was Bobby, waiting for her at the end of the line, opening his arms to her so that she could melt inside. Liquor on the breath could possibly prevent that melting. The third time around, however, El gave in and said she would just adore a gin and tonic. She’d been gone from the Laboe farm for a little over six hours. Though her suitcase—the one from her dead father—was stowed solidly underneath her seat, she imagined she could hear the Melitta dishes clinking softly against each other.

El had taken the dishes in the middle of the night as her mother slept. She’d lifted the tea and coffee pots from the cabinet in the basement kitchen and wrapped them in a cotton nightgown, stowed the cake platter at the bottom of the suitcase, hoping the cushioned lining would prevent it from breaking. During the fourth gin and tonic, El gazed again out the window and imagined she saw the chocolate-wafer edge of America.

They landed sometime in the early day. The waiting room was loud, strewn with paper cups and newspapers. The sounds of planes overhead rattled the chairs. She stood looking for help, for Bobby, but there was nothing. Eventually, El slumped into a chair attached to a miniature TV; she was hungry and thirsty and tired. To watch the television cost two quarters per fifteen minutes, but since Bob had told her she wouldn’t need any money once she arrived, she’d only packed an emergency five-mark bill.

The clock on the wall moved slowly; next thing, it was eight and the sky outside the plate glass was pure black. The janitor sweeping at her feet told her it was time to close this waiting area, that she would have to go to Arrivals. He showed her to the escalator. Good luck, ma’am, don’t let nothing happen to you.

But she nearly toppled down the moving stairs. Her suitcase seemed heavier than before.

She felt tears form. This country, it was so loud, so ugly, so wildly placid. She wanted to find a stewardess and ask how she could return to Germany—to Laboe on the Baltic—because was this how they did things in America? The man who swore his devotion—vanished like a ghost?

At the bottom of the moving stairs, she quickly saw Bob. Now Elspeth.

He looked much different than she’d imagined him since their fifth meeting five months ago: gaunt, mustached, palpable. No longer Bobby Lee—she saw immediately that he was to be called Bob. Now Elspeth.

He reached out a hand to her. No embrace, no tongue in her ear, no touch of her breasts. In her mind they were practically married, she’d run away to be with him, had taken her future wedding dishes without permission. She expected Bob would at least put his hand under her elbow, leading her the correct way into the future. But instead, he walked in front of her toward the luggage carousel; and when they got there and stood side by side, and she reached over to caress his cheek, Bob stepped back and frowned. Now Elspeth. Isn’t it enough you made me look all over the damn airport for you? Don’t you know I have better things to do? Plus, I had to get up and go to work this morning, unlike some people I know who spend their days drinking cocktails on Lufthansa jets.

His voice was so different from the voice he’d used in the aerograms, the one that began each letter with Baby or Darling or Sugarpie and ended with Forever Yours. His last letter, dated April 29, 1961, had begun Dear Sugarpie, I saw you in my dreams last night. As the luggage began to tumble onto the carousel, Bob took out a cigarette. Life in America was tough, he said, did she think she could make it? Did she bring any money? If she didn’t think she could make it, she might as well get back on the plane.

El didn’t know why they stood there; she already had the yellow suitcase in hand. As if reading her thoughts, Bob quickly tossed his cigarette. He led her to the exit by her hand. All the while never looking her directly in the face. Had she ever seen a cockroach, he asked, because his mother’s apartment, it was a cockroach paradise. His mother’s apartment—you couldn’t call it a honeymoon suite unless you were crazy—was only one bedroom, with him on the couch, and collards and chicken-fried steak three times a week. Pork chops and gospel radio on Sunday. He hated it, sometimes. But that was what was on the table.

Did she think she could handle that—black life?

Baby, we will live off a love, the letter from April 29 insisted.

Bob wiped his forehead with his shoulder, and El then noticed the large perspiration stains in the armpits. He noticed her looking. Been hot as hell, he said. Here in America, summer’s no joke. My mother has a Westinghouse fan, yes. But no air-conditioning, if that’s what you’re expecting.

The letter from April 29 had ended with the words I don’t know if you will want me once you are on these shores, but I will pray every day that you will. Forever Yours.

They walked out to the parking lot under a half moon. Bob swung the suitcase into the trunk, and just then she thought she heard the platter crack, the little lids of the coffee and tea pots clatter together. What in the hell you got in there, Bob asked, laughing, as he started the car.

The drive was bland, a few lights sparkling over Jamaica Bay.

Monique makes sure you can stand on your own (how no one else saw you throw up is a mystery) and then leans you against a pine tree, saying she has to go back inside for just a minute; she’s afraid Kate (a white girl from Duke who has forever and a day wanted to experience this kind of family reunion) might have fallen prey to her cousin Stanley. You haven’t seen Stanley in years, Monique whispers. But he’s still the same. Thinks he’s gone get his hands on Kate. But that’ll only happen after I get my hands on her.

You’ll love Kate, she says. You’re different.

She hurries off in a cloud of roadside dust and pollen. You imagine Monique finding her white lover and kissing her under a pile of stale pillows, in a wrought-iron bed, under dozens of family photographs—the ancestors. Forgetting about you for whole hours. When you attend their commitment ceremony three years later—only one uncle will come to the church where two females are saying “I do”—you notice the same crystals of love in her eyes, the same spike of deliverance as you see on this day, the last reunion you’ll ever attend.

You were ten years old when you told your mother about the nighttime touching. She rolled her eyes into her head, as if this were the straw that literally broke the camel’s back. How could he do this to me? she blurted. Then: Oh, baby.

It was nothing more than a few weeks’ worth of touching. The moon came out from your Mother Goose window and stared in shock. His finger didn’t even make it in all the way. Do you like this, your father asked. No, you answered. It took another five and a half weeks for him to get that through his head.

Ach du meine Güte! Heaven, hear me.

Your mother said she would leave him, take you and your brothers back to Germany. There was no way she could stay with a child molester. A monster.

Heaven, don’t stop hearing me!

But then weeks, more than a year passed.

When they entered his mother’s apartment on Hoyt Street, Bob set the suitcase down. The shower was running, and a woman’s voice sang the sweetest melody El had ever heard. The only way that we can survive, we need the Lord on our side!

Bob kissed El on her forehead and said, More of this later; he pointed to his lips. The woman in the shower called out to Bob to make his girl comfortable.

Bob took the salami out of the suitcase, holding it to the ceiling. You know, he said, we got food over here too. No need to drag this sucker clear across the world. This here salami is Italian food. What’s a German girl doing with Italian food?

El fell on the plastic slipcovered couch and rubbed her eyes. Her stomach growled. And she fell into a faint, a short deep sleep. No dreams whatsoever. Minutes later she woke up to Bob’s mother applying a cold washcloth to her face. What did you eat, baby? You bony as a bird.

El slowly raised herself and shook her head; she didn’t know enough English without her pocket dictionary to tell the woman that in fact the only thing she’d eaten all day was four gin and tonics. I got a pork chop in the icebox, his mother said. Let me go and heat it up, baby.

Bob turned away. But El could see the Army still left over in his bones and she felt his anger. Mama, he said. We don’t want that country food. Let me show my girl what we got to offer in Brooklyn!

And despite his mother’s protests, he lugged El back out in the car again; it was nearly 11. Her eyes were fully open as she rolled down the window. By now, her mother would probably be pulling her hair out, weeping with utter and relentless despair. That’s how El liked to imagine her: writhing in regret. Her mother had once denied knowing that the Jewish girls who came by after the war were starving. They looked fine to me, she’d said, giving all the crab apples to the horses. Bob pulled into a restaurant that had a window on its side and a sullen girl stuck in that window. Hello my name is Maryann and welcome to Jack in the Box and can I take your order? Bob grinned at the girl, then turned back to El; Dry your eyes, girl, he said. You making me look bad.

They ate in the car while listening to Ray Charles on the radio. When they got home, his mother greeted them at the door in a caftan gown. El had never seen anyone so smart, a woman who looked like a magazine. You will make my son very happy, Barbara said. She kissed El’s ears with lips that felt like firm pin cushions. Bob’s mother was thirty-six years old.

She served El a slice of sweet potato pie on a chipped plate with cornflowers around the edge and spread out a blanket on the couch. It’s not a fold-out but I hope you will be comfortable, she said. I don’t believe in young folks pretending marriage. It’s my church upbringing, but don’t even mention the word church to Bob! Do, and he’ll give you a mouthful.

She embraced her full-on, a mother’s hug. Bob’s told me only a little about you, so tomorrow I hope you’ll fill in all the blanks, Barbara said. And that was the very last thing El heard.

She felt herself lifted into the air. She felt herself descending into the ground. After so many years of no dreams, she was bombarded that night by pictures she hadn’t seen for ages. Cows, fires, birch trees, coins.

Dreams are nothing but random images, an elderly Polish doctor would tell her years later. This is how they do things in America.

They want to be nice to you, all these relatives at the reunion in Spring Hope. Cleopatra and Susie and Katrina and Shequanna and Betty. Horace and Clotilda and Tanya and Dove. They want to be nice, in spite of the way your eyes are your father’s eyes, your nose flat brown and wide as his. When you talk, even the younger cousins say they can hear Cousin Bobby’s voice come alive in yours. You know these kids have never met him, that they only know him from tall tales. Still, you laugh when they say that if he were to step foot on Grandma Elldine’s land, they would kill him with a hatchet.

They can’t imagine, these young cousins say, what it would be like to live in California and never see North Carolina again.

No, they will have to carry me out, one eight-year-old boy announces.

The sun is starting to set over the field. You breathe in this air: a hint of sulfuric chicken farm, a drying watering hole but evergreens as far as the nose can smell. A hint of thimbleweed out the corner of your eye.

You loom alone at the picnic tables like an unlit candle. The women and the uncles are discussing an evening service at the Baptist church. Ancient Hattie Mabel wonders if you’d like to come. It’s about time you learned the words to all the songs they sing.

But then, deus ex machina, Cousin Meggie comes running from her pickup. A giant cross plops between her breasts.

Sasha Jean, she cries. I been praying you wouldn’t forget me!

She is as round as the proverbial barrel, and yet she moves storklike from the truck between the fading aunts and uncles. You’ve thought about her for years but haven’t picked up a pen or tapped on a keyboard. What would those hicks have to say to you? your father once asked. What would they have to say to anybody?

You stopped seeing him, despite his letters, his infrequent calls to your college dorm, your first apartment in Manhattan, your sublet in the Bronx. When you turned eighteen, you announced you were never going to see him again, and he laughed. Sasha, he said. People make mistakes. People get over things. It’s the course of life. Grudges are about as real as cotton candy.

But you kept true to your word. Years passed—and then you received notice that he’d died in his sleep. Next to Faith Akintola. In front of her favorite show: Luke and Laura, escaping on foot over the top of a jetliner. In the middle of the ocean. During a lunar eclipse.

Meggie squashes you with treacly hugs, doesn’t wait for any answers before immediately asking after your mom. Her skin is as light as a white person’s; her eyes, round and small (Mongoloid, your father once said), literally sparkle as she talks. She says your mom’s name, and her face is quickly awash in tears—she apologizes for not sending any kind of note when she heard of your mother’s death. Victuals always heal a broken heart, she says, leading you to the table with the hot sauce steak and loading another plate high. Crispy kale and artichoke hearts. You want to tell Meggie that now you officially belong to her, to them—what use is a girl without a parent to stake her in the landscape? But she is eyeing you up and down; too skinny, she concludes. Your mama would not be happy.

When you shake your head, Meggie frowns. Your mama was the best thing that ever happened to this earth, she says, waving over Aunt Quincy and her bowl of spicy pork barbecue.

El awoke the next Brooklyn morning not on the sofa but on a huge double bed. Striped sheets had crumpled under her armpits; a thin blanket straggled at her feet. El felt a terrible, lovely ache in her shoulders, in between her legs. Music sounded from the kitchen, from a radio on the table; later in the day someone would say, You mean you never heard gospel music before? Lord Have Mercy!

A car horn screeched the sunlight into her eyes. Bob, she called.

Later that day, El would sit in the front pew of the First Church of Christ on Avenue J and nod along as the choir sang, “Going Up Yonder.” She would be next to her future mother-in-law; her husband was at home, looking out the window.

The church mothers would cast glances her way, happy that a white person had finally sat in the pews without looking over their shoulder. The pastor, Melvin K. Ritter, commanded the congregation to stand and be thankful; El liked this. She liked standing and begging, slowly, not too fast, the pure act of supplication, of asking things of someone who might just actually fulfill her deepest wishes. Just before his final sermon, he introduced Bob’s bride-to-be to the entire congregation.

Child’s too small, said one church mother in the pew behind El. Better put some meat on that skeleton, said another, smiling at Bob’s mother. Them Krauts do indeed have it bad, after all this time.

When the sermons were done (there were five in all), the church people went to the basement and sat at a long table in front of several platters of minute steaks, cornbread stuffing, and okra; many wrinkled hands took hold of El’s, wishing her the best with Bob. Lord knows other girls have tried to get him to change his ways, the hands told her. Hopefully, El would be the lucky one.

You and Meggie head to the watering hole—Monique has texted that she will get there as soon as “lovingly possible.” Meggie blushes as she stuffs her phone into her bra. She says she’s all right with two ladies in love even though there is something creepy about it.

You enter the woods—about a half mile in is the bluestone watering hole, the one that is said (by Aunt Vitrine and others) to contain healing liquids. The trees hang low, and you notice that it is dark but not pitch; you can still find your way. You’d hoped for complete darkness—what would they say when they learned you hadn’t said a proper goodbye to the man? Down here, everyone deserves a proper goodbye, hated or no.

You hope for one of those legendary water moccasins to snake its way to your ankle and take out a huge chunk.

Would it be wrong to tell them that the last time you saw your father, you said nothing specific? That the words forgive and forget never made it past your lips? That you engaged the reams of selves who came before you—the little baby in the carriage, the kindergartner, the science project acolyte—and told them it was time to close up shop, as though your father had never ever existed? He once was alive, and was all things to those former selves. You, on the other hand, despise that idea. Was it wrong to turn your head away from the phone the last time he called? Was it wrong to crunch up the letter in which he explained he’d suffered a major heart attack and needed just a touch of kindness? You hate him for keeping your mother, and you hate your mother for having been kept. You have his last will and testament sewn into a seam of the blouson, sort of like the way slaves traveled with their papers. You’d read about slaves in the fifth grade. Your father tested you on their names for a social studies test. He patted your head when you got the answers correct.

This thirty-seven acres is yours.

Immediately as you step foot under the canopy of trees, you are eaten by mosquitoes. Meg has something in a small flask; she offers it to you, and you take it down fast, lemonade and something bathtubby. Meggie giggles uncontrollably and admits that she’s always wanted to visit California and start herself all over again.

But dreams cost, she suddenly moans, her lips puffed out with fake citrus.

At the next clearing, she stops and puts her cheek against your arm. You had the best mom in the world, Meggie says.

You tell her you know.

Meggie ignores you, saying, She saw me on one of your visits—I think you were only seven at the time. Your mama saw me and marched straight to my mama—God rest Evangeline’s soul but my mother was a dumbass—and told her I was having a quote unquote rough time of it. That I needed more taken care of. That she only had one Meggie in the world, and what was the sense in ignoring that?

Your mama, she says. She saw my belly bowling out like a sail in the wind. She saw my legs bow and the ringworm on my cheeks blossom like flowers. Your mama saw, Sasha Jean. And she said something. And at that point, my mama had no choice but to look at me.

You want to ask her what happened, but Meggie is already walking away. You remember Meggie’s family, the father whose eyes were so outlined in whiskey they looked like huge beetles on his face, the mother whose cough shook every house on the road of relatives. Once they both took you to church and called you their adopted daughter—Look at this good skin, they’d said, almost in unison. You laughed when they did this—was it 1970 or even earlier?

You arrive at a grove of pear trees, tucked away neatly in this back wood against a small bluestone quarry. Vines everywhere come alive as snakes and then go back dead as plants. This is where Grandma Elldine used to go for her canning fruit. You smell their fragrance, wish to reach for the fruit. Your mama, Meggie keeps saying, If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t’ve been alive.

Your mother died on her way to the VFW nursing home where she was a volunteer. She’d been planning to visit her own ailing mother in Kiel, had even booked her tickets. But then her heart conked out, and she had to be placed in the nursing home morgue. The veterans went crazy, sliding their wheelchairs into walls, throwing food at each other. How could Mrs. Elspeth be gone? And so young?

Try as he might, the Polish doctor in charge could not get those men to calm down for weeks and weeks.

You are ten and Fortunoff is the store of dreams. Like your Aunt Vitrine once said to you: don’t let your eyes get bigger than your stomach! Well, this is your mother in Fortunoff. She wants everything; as our neighbor Miss Jerldean sometimes says behind her back, Fifth Avenue tastes on a Bowery budget. It is a Saturday when the two of you escape here; your father lies in the backyard with a cold compress on his forehead; it was only the day before that you told your mother about the nighttime touching. In Fortunoff, you and she can forget the world.

Your mother admires the blue onion pattern of the Wedgwood, the clean dullness of the Rosenthal. Are you in the market for bone today, the salesgirl asks. Her tag says EVIE. It’s a bit early, but have you seen the Christmas Spode?

Your mother says as a matter of fact, she was in the Christmas mood right now. Who says you can’t have Christmas in July?

Here, Evie says, Feel this. Villeroy and Boch, straight from the Manhattan showroom. Hold one of these cups up to the light and you can see clear through, like it’s a veil.

Last spring, the Church Mothers of Pomegranate Baptist chipped in to get your mother a set of white coffee cups, a thank-you for being such an inspiration to the kids at Tuesday Teen Services. Who knew that hearing all that talk about life during the Big War would have made such a difference to these young folks? Always mouthing off as if they knew life better than everybody else—thank God for Miss El and her tales of woe at the hands of that Nazi scum! (The Church Mothers were not above occasionally using a swear word in their speech.) Four white mugs, supposedly out of pure Japanese china, had been stuffed in a Christmas box and tied together with twine. I seen those very same mugs in White’s Department Store, two for a dollar, said Bob. Why these females have to be so damn cheap? There isn’t a damn thing for you in that church.

Evie goes in the back and brings out a soup tureen. This is my personal favorite, she announces happily. Her lips, your mother notices, are the color of strawberries.

For those women not afraid to spend a little more on themselves, Evie adds, a bit louder; perhaps she has noticed your mother’s thick accent.

The trip to Fortunoff is a major departure. You both were supposed to go to the Fruit Tree, and then to White’s for some tube socks, and then to the doctor, the one who will tell your mother that IUDs don’t normally fail, and if she is in the family way, it is due to her own recklessness. Then on to the butcher for lamb chops, and finally to the dentist, where she would have that impacted wisdom tooth looked at.

So much to do.

But early this morning, when the dawn was sparkling with a few lights over Pomegranate treetops, something possessed your mother. She waited. She called Miss Jerldean and asked her to pick the boys up from school later—Johann from the first grade, little Keith from kindergarten; she pulled you from your bed and tossed you into the backseat; she drove at the speed limit to Westbury, where Fortunoff loomed like a Long Island Everest.

You’ve always wanted to come here. You’ve always wanted to go with your mother. But it would take until now, the day after you told your mother. In the store she doubles over the counter and begins to cry. To you she whispers that the word finger literally crushed her spine.

Ma’am, are you OK? Evie asks.

Utter exasperation. Your mother replies she’s fine, all the while caressing the bottom of the dark blue salad bowl on the counter. It isn’t the blue onion, but rather a blue fleur-de-lis. It is a pattern she is gradually and quickly falling in love with. The small bowl has a rounded bottom and soft, wavering edges. You touch your mother’s hand with your own.

Sorry, ma’am, you can’t just buy one piece. It comes in a five-piece place setting. Tureen, large cake platter, medium cake platter, teapot, coffee pot, creamer, sugar additional.

You look up and see the impatience in Evie’s eyes.

And can hear your mother’s thoughts, loud and clear, funneled into your own head, the small bowl in her hands: how wonderful it would be to run away, with just the girl. To come back in a few weeks for the other kids. But just have this girl, all to myself. To hear what the world has been saying all along.

The bowl is hard as a rock.

Your mother purchases an entire dinner service of the unnamed pattern, twenty pieces in all, but says she’ll have to come back at a later date for the soup tureen and cake platter. She is, after all, not made out of money.

With the first light of her first morning in America, El felt the wind blowing in from the open window. A train clanged by, as if the track were close by. Bob, she called out again.

She found her suitcase in the front room of the apartment, right where Bob had dropped it, and she immediately went for the lock she’d snapped shut after tossing the cufflinks back inside.

The tea and coffee pots were fine, maybe a tiny chip on the edge of one lid. The platter was broken in three places. With glue, it could be restored. A bit of glue and some sun, some fresh New York air. The skyline, the taxis, the restaurants, the department stores. Gin and tonic flowing like a gulfstream toward Jamaica Bay, and from there out to the beckoning Atlantic.

She laid the Melitta dishes—blue pansies etched on a white background—back into the suitcase and went into the kitchen. The radio played soft and loud at the same time. Outside this window, which was covered with an eyelet curtain, a woman and child walked by, laughing.

El’s hands felt damp. She smelled like Bob’s hair, his chest. Surely there was a tea kettle somewhere in this kitchen. Above the stove a small plaque bearing the face of a black man read: I’VE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP.

She would have to shower, she would have to wash her hair.

The swim was more delicious than food; afterward, you all rest on your backs on the slick bluestone shore, you and Monique and Kate (high as kites off some pills they borrowed from Stanley) and Meggie, who can’t seem to stop crying. Her face has gone back to childhood, with its circles of ringworm and eye dirt. She says she will never get over the day your mother saved her life.

Once, she says, there was a family all living on top of each other in a double-wide but still there was no room. We ate Cap’n Crunch every day and felt hungry all the time. Then this lady appeared out of a cream-colored DeVille. She was wearing a blue scarf on her head, like a turban, and she smelled of lilacs.

Little girl, she said to me. Don’t make such a sad face.

She lifted me into her arms, and I could smell baby roses over those lilacs. The powder blue ones, the kinds with the thorns that don’t make any difference.

Little girl, she said, Would you like to come live with me?

And I was all set to drift asleep, let this fine lady take me with her, away from the smell of unwashed cereal bowls and all the feet of my brothers.

She was better than a fairy godmother. She was cleaner than a queen. There was a pot of summer rhubarb boiling somewhere. And just like that, I recall my mama having words with her. Saying some nonsense about how her daughter was not some African orphan in the desert.

The truth was, I would’ve gone to any desert.

My mama lived twenty years after that day. You know what happened to me. On her last day at Auntsville Rehabilitation, where she was fidgeting with her kidneys, she told me I looked like a million bucks. How was it I raised such a gorgeous gal, she asked. Her lips were like quarry silt.

You did such a good job, I told her. I didn’t want to bring up the cream DeVille. I didn’t want to talk about that blue scarf or the queen walking into every house like she owned it. I was afraid of seeing the last drop of my mama evaporate on the spot.

Quit that bellyaching, Monique says, laughing. We all been there. We never look back, dummy.

What you need is a baby, says Kate, who is the only one—besides you—who is childless. She adds, A baby to love in the right way.

Monique swats her cheek gently and says, Lucky for us, there will never be a shortage of kids. Take your pick you want another one. Myself, I got three I’d love to give you. And I think Sasha Jean about ready to tell us of the newest addition, isn’t that right?

No one waits for an answer: instead, they laugh faintly and remove their wet shirts and shorts. They are becoming mermaids, and for some reason, you can’t stand to watch. Is it ever too late? Would swimming be better than a life of feathers? You know you’re no different from the rest—so you get up and dive back into the hole, letting its blackness swallow you. Too late: at water’s touch, your arms become fins and your legs fuse together. Your belly feels cold as you plow through the underground ripples; your neck has grown bright brown scales. The others don’t seem to notice. But moments later, they call out to you, and then dive in themselves.

Do they change? You can’t really tell. Eventually, you all swim, however, with the same ease, the same ruffled glide, to a mangrove tree, the roots of which sit like umbrella handles above the water. When you come up for air, you all look strangely bloodless. Tell us, Monique finally says, resting one arm on a root, What would you say, Sasha Jean, to some extra cash?

When you raise your eyebrows, she says, I plan to empty out the uncles’ payday accounts tomorrow. I figured out a computer way.

Please don’t name me accomplice after the fact, Kate says, swooping over to kiss Monique on the lips. Meggie blushes.

You are quiet, bobbing your head halfway into the water. And then you plunge as deep as you can to the bottom. You can hear the girls shout after you—Rude Bitch, why can’t you answer the question! You gone tell on us?

It’s lonely down below but also green. Pallid, alive. You wonder, as you open your eyes, where all the green has come from. There must be snakes here, you think, as you pull yourself—with fin arms—down farther into the hole.

He will never love you like he used to, your mother told you.

But he says I’m his favorite.

You are an angel, she replies, wincing. I have to live with that.

Down below, you believe you see your mother’s bluestone eyes, feel her farm-toughened hand upon your forehead. In Laboe there is an authentic German submarine on display on the sand; you can read the plaque and you can wail but you can’t go in. You look past the motionless sea plants and recognize a knife in your mother’s apron pocket. If he ever says “finger” again, she warns, then lifts the knife to her breast. You reach out and she vanishes among the weeds—how could you tell her that he never once even uttered that word?

When you bubble up out from the depth—when you gasp for air and hold tightly to Meggie’s arm—you hear Kate, speaking in a thick Southern accent, imitating someone back at the reunion. Hattie or Cathy or LaWanda or Ancient Hattie Mabel. Chris or Daquan or Malik or Harris. You think they’ve forgotten you when suddenly Monique nods toward the reunion noise in the distance and says, If Bobby Lee intends to take back Grandma Elldine’s house, he’s got another thing coming. Family is family. We got our own ideas.

You and what army, Kate asks. That house needs bulldozed, plain and simple.

It’ll be a place for you and me one day, Monique announces, taking Kate’s hand and pressing it against her neck. You and me.

Y’all better cut that shit out, says Meggie. But don’t forget to make me bridesmaid.

They laugh. They touch. Sunbeams try hard to burst through the woods’ canopy. You’re supposed to evict them all.

Kate says, I like it here. I open my eyes and every day it’s a new surprise.

Only a white girl would say that, Meggie laughs.

Why don’t you say something, Monique suddenly asks.

But you’re sure you are saying something, that words are actually exiting your mouth and penetrating their ears. You’re pretty sure you’re telling them that as of nine months ago, you inherited everything here, as far as the eye can see. Thirty-seven acres. You paid for it. You can’t imagine ever wanting to set foot here again.

And perhaps they have heard. Monique flips her fins playfully in front of her. We’d miss you if you never came back, she says, not understanding. This is a sign. They hear what they want to hear. And that’s fine with you. You can never really be free, but you’re already there.

Crows and starlings screech through the landscape. In the distance there is the fragrance of the pig being roasted on the spit. You hear the old shingles peel off the Victorian and land in the elderberry hedge. The house will certainly die.

You clear your throat, make your way to the other side of the pond. The others release themselves from the umbrella handles and follow you, drifting on their backs. A child screams into the woods and waits for an answer. Ancient Hattie Mabel is shouting the words to “I’m Getting Ready.”

You all dive again, this time not needing to come up for air. This is the world and there is no need for stealing, kissing, anger at past wounds. This world operates on scales and silt.

You expect it to end. For the fins to melt, the tails to finally recede, the women to call you all back to the tables. Hair will be quickly braided or wrapped into shirts, skin smoothed back into order. You expect that soon you will all tramp slowly and un-eagerly through the forest—Kate will suddenly squeal in horror as she steps upon a harmless worm—and then it will take forever for Meggie and Monique to tame her cries with their hands.

A fantasy arises in which you all continue your walk, even with the brays and hollers of the slave women in these woods, their feet smashing snakes, their arms tattered by thorned vines, their minds agape with the babies they could not afford to carry. The slave women are deafening, the slave women are worse than ghosts. You wonder if your parents are trapped here with the slave women. Would they torture your parents like ghosts in a cheap horror flick? Would that make you feel any better?

But this is all so conveniently stashed away. The world you’re in now is all scales and silt. Meggie, Monique, and Kate dive deep, trail air bubbles behind them; their light and dark brown breasts hang over their bellies, not in perfect mermaid style, but in the style of girls who have longed to do this since the day they were born. Their hair floats in the depth like a series of snowballs. They remind you of Christmas. There is swimming, miles of it—and a surprise underground clearing, and giggles over mermaid nipples and moles, and promises, and some hope. Why ever resurface? Why not stay here for all time? Dandelion wine and nougat truffles. You could live like kings.

It’s tempting, but not going to happen. Land ho! Meggie screams, laughing as she runs on ahead; she’ll be the first one to fill up another plate and hug the kids. Kate and Monique touch fingers to lips behind every tree, vow to go to Stanley’s room and steal the rest of his “raw material.”

And over midnight margaritas on Aunt Nephronia’s roof, you tell them (these girls now your girls) in clear, cement words, that you have no idea what your father is planning on doing to the land. But you promise it won’t be anything bad.

El lifted her hand to her throat and felt the tiniest swell there, like a foamy wave bundling itself to the shore. She would have to go out and see Jamaica Bay up close. She would have to find that chocolate-wafer edge of the world, once again.

There in the afternoon sunlight of the kitchen table, El dared not move. She hated the feeling that life was a race—would it be possible to remain here like this, forever? She found a pack of cigarettes behind the toaster and took one out, a race to the finish.

Anyone there, called Bob, slamming open the front door to the apartment. He carried a bag of sweet rolls in his arm. I’m home. I’m home.

She rose from the table, allowing herself to swoon against the wall. Don’t I get no sugar, he asked, and she felt oddly moved by his stingy smile.

He buried his face in her neck. I’m a changed man, he whispered. Do you believe?

But El wasn’t listening. She was wondering, instead, if her mother had finally noticed that the dishes were gone. She kept seeing the old face, disappointed and yearning at the same time. Not at all the right punishment for the crime.