The Solace of Leaving Early (19 page)

“Oh my God! Grandma Wilkey is at our house!” Surprise visits were the worst for AnnaLee, because her mother seemed to have a sixth sense for mayhem and general disorder. Once Grandma Wilkey had shown up when the entire family was chasing a stray cat through the house, a cat inflicted with a particularly virulent gastrointestinal disorder. Another time she’d arrived at
ten o’clock at night
—Langston was certain her grandmother ordinarily went to bed around seven—and found AnnaLee in the living room with her women’s support group, drunk and trying to learn to belly dance. (The belly dancing was also a very shocking sight to Langston, one that probably left permanent scars.) Oh! and the worst of all, and how she hated to remember it: Langston had come rushing home from college, certain she had cancer, having discovered a terrible, painful, unsightly lump on, let’s just say, her hip. It turned out to be a boil, and her Grandma Wilkey walked in the house—walked in without knocking!—and found Langston on the sofa, with her pants down, having the boil lanced by Jolene.

“Girls,” she said through clenched teeth, “I need to stop for just a minute at my house, okay? And then we’ll go straight to your grandma’s and fix some lunch. Is that all right?”

Immaculata looked up at Langston, worried. “What’s wrong, is something wrong, what’s happening?”

“No, sweetheart, no,” Langston said, pulling in behind her grandmother’s car. “My own grandma is at my house, and I don’t think my mama, AnnaLee, was expecting her. Can we just check on her, on AnnaLee?”

Both girls nodded.

They opened the door to the living room, and it was far worse than Langston had expected. Her grandmother was sitting on the edge of the sofa in a houndstooth suit and white blouse, and AnnaLee was desperately trying to straighten up the piles of laundry covering every surface. She was now washing all of her own family’s clothes, plus everything the girls wore under their robes and for sleeping, and Beulah’s clothes, and as a matter of fact, there were piles of things Langston had never seen before. There were boxes everywhere. Langston didn’t know what was in them; they hadn’t been there when she left in the morning.

“Hello, Grandma Wilkey,” Langston said, crossing the living room to give her a kiss.

“Hello, dear,” her grandmother said, turning her cheek. She smelled dry and powdery, and like mothballs. “Who is this with you?” She gave the children an automatic, feigned smile.

Langston quickly kissed her mother, who was perspiring, which of course made her hair stand out like a cloud, then stood in front of the girls. She’d made a mistake in bringing them in the house. “These are just some friends of mine. In fact, we need to be moving along.”

“Darling, you should introduce them properly.” Her grandmother stood, and Langston could see that she intended to see something through to the end, whatever the end was. Her flat, black purse hung from her forearm.

“Another time, Grandma. We’ll just run along and go over the rules of civilized behavior on the way.” Langston turned to shepherd the girls out of the house and found them frozen, wide-eyed. Immaculata’s mouth was open as if she’d been trying to say something.

“What’s wrong? Immaculata, what’s the—”

“Langston, I think we should get the girls over to Beulah’s; this isn’t—”

“Girls,” Grandma Wilkey said, walking toward them. She carefully skirted all impediments, including a pile of Little Mermaid panties. “I’m Marjorie Wilkey. It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I just wanted to say that I was so sorry to hear about your—”

“Mama, what is in those boxes? Immaculata, look at me. Take your sister’s hand and—”

Oh to have seen it from above, AnnaLee moving across the room toward the girls, Langston holding them from behind, trying to move them toward the door, and her Grandma Wilkey heading right for them, expecting them to shake her hand and be grateful for her pinch of sympathy. Langston could see so clearly what her grandmother was going to do: she was going to demand that the children accept the fact that their mother’s death was just another social occasion, for which the world had developed conventions.

And then she saw it: a school backpack lying on top of two pairs of rain boots. Here was their former life, the mere suggestion of which could strike them dumb, laid open for all to see.

“Don’t say another word.” Langston took a step so menacing toward her grandmother that she stopped dead, her hand still extended. “Don’t move another inch toward these children.” She turned toward the girls, who were now looking at her, rather than at the boxes. “Immaculata, take my hand. Mama, pick up Epiphany and help me get her to Beulah’s. Grandma Wilkey, don’t be here when I get back. None of us has time for an unannounced visit from you. I’m terribly sorry for my rudeness, and you are welcome to take it up with me at a more opportune time.”

“Langston! I will not be spoken to that way under
any
—”

“Mother,” AnnaLee said, swinging Epiphany up on her hip. “You heard Langston. That’s enough.”

The last thing Langston saw, pushing against the screen door with her shoulder, was her grandmother standing in the middle of the living room, watching them go.

“Can I—” Immaculata began.

Langston didn’t realize she was dragging Immaculata, or that she was trying to say something, until they were almost to the sidewalk. “Oh dear. I was abrupt. What are you saying, sweetheart?”

Immaculata swallowed, blinked. “Can I have my backpack?”

Langston stood up straight and let her head fall back on her shoulders. She loosened her grip on Immaculata’s hand until their fingers were lightly touching. “Yes, baby. You can have anything you want.”

*

“All right. What we’re going to do is, excuse me? Hello? Bubble Gum Girl? What we’re going to do is say the Ten Commandments. Immaculata claims that you already know them.” Epiphany stared at the posterboard, breathing noisily through her mouth. She appeared to be chewing at least four pieces of gum, which she sometimes fished out of her mouth and held on the end of her thumb. “Do you know them?” Langston asked.

“What.”

Immaculata was going through her backpack very carefully, taking out each item and staring at it a long time, then placing it on the table. So far she’d removed a notebook covered with sparkly stickers, a Hello Kitty pencil box, a red hair ribbon, and a Tweety Bird Pez dispenser. She looked at the things spread out in front of her the way Langston had seen, in news clips, family members examine items retrieved from suitcases after a plane crash. Not certain whether Immaculata wanted to be alone, Langston had asked if she’d like to take the bag to her room, but she’d shaken her head no.

“The Ten Commandments. Do you know them? Because we’re going to say them, and if you forget some, I have them written down right here. And then we’re going to write them on this posterboard, this is the ‘crafts’ portion of lessons, Immaculata’s going to do that part, and you’re . . . you, Epiphany, are going to use this stamper and stamp on pictures. Then you can fill them in with your markers. I swear I’m talking to a . . . Bepiphany?” Langston knocked her on the head. “Are you in there?”

Epiphany laughed through her nose, and her gum fell out of her mouth.

“Shall we, then?” They began to speak in unison, although sometimes Langston didn’t have a clue what Epiphany was saying.

“You have only one God.

“Don’t use God’s name the wrong way.

“Make time for God.

“Be good to your mother and father.

“Don’t kill people.

“Love your own husbands and wives.

“Don’t steal.

“Don’t lie.

“Love your own wife and family” (clearly a mistake, this repetition, Langston thought).

“Don’t take things that belong to other people” (ditto).

When they finished, Immaculata slowly and carefully put her belongings back in her backpack and placed it in the corner of the kitchen. There was a brief but intense scuffle over whose elbows went on what corner of the cardboard, but soon enough that was solved and the girls were working quietly. They had only an hour before Amos Townsend appeared. Beulah was napping in her bedroom; she had been short of breath for the past two days, and her ankles were swollen.

“I heard something,” Immaculata said, a bit under her breath.

“What?” Langston said, looking around. “What did you hear?” Germane was asleep by the front door.

“I heard my grandma tell someone on the phone that you were in Haddington because you quit school.”

Epiphany looked up. “Oooooooo! Laaaaaangston!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Langston sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “Yes? So? Yes, I did quit school. I was studying for a Ph.D. at a university far away from here and I left. End of story.”

“Hmmm.” Immaculata gave her a look, then went back to her lettering.

“I had to leave, if you must know.”

The girls remained silent. The periodic screeching of a Magic Marker over cardboard was causing Langston’s spine to tingle in a singularly unpleasant fashion. “Well, I didn’t
have
to leave, no one
asked
me to leave, I was a star. As you can probably imagine.”

She crossed her legs and bit the inside of her cheek.

“I was compromised, since you’ve asked.” Langston let her head drop into her hands. “Oh, the politics! They are so terrible in an English department, so very much worse than Machiavellian. Life in an English department
never
rises to the level of Machiavelli—that would be such a welcomed evolution—no, no, it’s more like an inner-city riot; fires burning in the street, looting, horribly misconceived slogans.”

“Go on,” Immaculata said, without looking at Langston.

“Look. I tried to stay above the fray, I did. I could see the smoke in the distance and tried to avoid the conflagration. All I wanted was to live the life of the mind, and I know it’s a terribly shopworn thing to say, but there you have it. I didn’t stand in any camp, I wasn’t a formalist or a feminist, I didn’t want to call myself a reader-response person or a deconstructionist or a poststructuralist. I wasn’t a Marxist or a proponent of queer theory, or a Freudian, a post colonialist, or God help us! there was a black man in our department, a graduate student like me, who wanted us to start a movement to rename Multiculturalism ‘Slave Studies.’ He believed there was some sort of cleansing, revolutionary power in the ‘ironic distancing,’ that’s what he called it.” Langston took a deep breath, then sighed, remembering it all. “And no one could say anything to him, because we had no authority—that’s the key to the recent developments in the critical tradition: if you’re inside—and believe me, academia is nothing but a cult of expertise, it is the only religion alive and well—only if you’re inside do you have any authority, and if that’s the case, no one can speak to you. Your
curriculum vitae
becomes your fortress. Epiphany, try and resist stamping on your arms or your . . . Look, there’s the poster and that’s your, sweetheart, stamp the poster. Thank you.”

Langston poured each of them a glass of lemonade and carried them to the table. Epiphany still preferred a sippy-cup. Everyone preferred that Epiphany use a sippy-cup. “Let’s say I had decided to go the way of theory, and had chosen a camp; naturally, I would have had enemies in every other school of thought. But guess what happened instead? I tried to stay neutral, and had no friends.”

*

Langston was the locus, and she didn’t believe this was an exaggeration, of the collective anxiety of the entire department. Some people hated her because she was arrogant, or believed to be so; some hated her because she didn’t speak enough in class, thus revealing her faux humility. She wasn’t clever or ambitious enough for theory, or she was too ambitious for theory, and had a nefarious plan up her sleeve to overthrow the power structure. Because she didn’t wear T-shirts bearing the likeness of Emma Goldman or Eudora Welty, and because she didn’t have any posters hanging on her office door proclaiming, “If you can walk, you can dance. If you can speak, you can sing,” or whatever that saying was, she was considered an enemy of women, and because she was not sexually available, she was the enemy of men. Even in that environment, she survived. She believed she’d make it to the end.

And then she took the John Donne seminar. She’d waited until her last semester of course work, because she knew it would be one of the highlights of her graduate school career, taught, as it was, by Jacques Perrin. Jacques Perrin. Second-generation French American, past president and solar flare in the International John Donne Society. An expert not on Donne’s love poems (that would be too obvious) but on the Holy Sonnets. Author of
Resurrection, Imperfect: Divinity in Donne,
and
Little World: The Abridgement of the Universe,
along with countless articles and conference presentations. Perrin was one of the many scholars, scattered across England and America, who had been working on the Donne Variorum for years.

Jacques was not so tall, not quite six feet, and compact. Spare and athletic. He rode a bicycle to school all through the reasonable months. He had short, dark hair, and a black beard streaked with silver, which he kept cut close. On the first day of class that year he’d worn black dress slacks and a black turtleneck under a black cashmere sport coat. Cashmere.

They’d moved their chairs into a circle, with Dr. Perrin right in the midst of them (no podium for him), and he took attendance, making certain they all knew each other (they did, unfortunately). He said he wanted to perform a little test, and leaning back in his chair, resplendent and at ease, he’d recited Donne’s most famous sonnet, “The Flea.” They were all perfectly, respectfully silent. Some were, perhaps, even moved by his rendering.

“‘Three in one,’ Donne says, your blood and mine combined with the flea’s. The Trinity. What could be more intimate than that? This is a poem of seduction, of course, in which the woman’s honor is stolen as soon as her blood mingles with that of the speaker. And since she has nothing left to protect, why not? Why not give herself entirely to him?”

The students continued to watch him, rapt, even though what he was saying was certainly not news to any of them.