This Is the Place

Away from Dangerous Things

Desiree Cooper

One night in 1942, when my mother, Bobbie, was only nine years old, the walls of her family’s tiny, wood-frame house began to shudder. Her heart thrashing, she jumped up in the bed. Beside her on the bumpy, thin mattress lay her mother, deep under the spell of slumbered grief.

“Mommy?” Bobbie whispered. “Do you hear that?”

At first, the sound was like the rumble of the Norfolk Southern making its midnight run through Waverly, Virginia, a depot town of barely a thousand people. But then, it gathered into something more discrete—a furious pounding like a crew of carpenters at work. Hammer against nail. Saw against grain. Hinge against jamb. Anger against regret.

“Junious?” Her mother sat up in the bed, pulling Bobbie close. “What you doin’ in the kitchen?”

Neither mother nor daughter stopped to question that it was anybody but Junious, now four days dead. Nor did they question that he would be in the kitchen, in the thick of the night, raising holy hell.

Bobbie heard her father’s disembodied voice rasping from the back of the house. “Stay in the bed!” he commanded. Terrified, she whimpered as her mother held her tight.

This was not Junious’s first visitation. Since his death, he had come in the darkness and rocked their bed like a dinghy on the open sea. He had pulled fresh clothes off the line and strewn them across the backyard. He’d caused the naked light bulbs to blink off and on. Now he was in the kitchen, banging furiously on the back door.

Decades later, my mother would tell me this story like it was a testimony. By then, she was a long way from the little girl cowering in her mother’s bed, listening to her father’s ghost rage through the night. But she never lost her belief that her kin could visit from the other side, bringing with them signs and omens, protection and advice. The night that her dead father hammered in the kitchen was no exception. Later that day, they heard from the neighbors that there had been a thief on the prowl on the Rural Route 40. He had stolen corn from bins, the Stokleys’ good ax, and hams from the Johnson’s smokehouse. But no one had bothered the widow and her little girl, Bobbie, even though they had fallen asleep with their kitchen door unlocked.

My mother believed her father had come to hammer their door shut and keep them safe. The neighbors called it a miracle.

When Bobbie was twenty-one, she married my dad, Willie, in a civil ceremony in Connecticut. They had been neighbors in Waverly since they were six years old. Despite their deep roots in the sawmill town tucked in the Virginia Piedmont, neither ever doubted that they would one day escape its clutches. My dad’s ticket came in the form of a football scholarship to North Carolina A & T in 1952. When he was cut from the team after his second year, he joined the air force to continue his education. My mom did what many women did back then—she went to college to find a husband. But after two years, she ended up marrying the boy next door.

They say that fleas, when captured in a jar, will eventually stop trying to escape even after the lid is removed. I often think of this in contrast to the human spirit, which can continue to push against what appears to be an airtight reality, against all odds. To this day, I marvel that two young people who grew up under the oppression of the Jim Crow South would even imagine that they had a right to be citizens of the world. But my parents did. Within four years of my dad enlisting, they found themselves a black couple in post-war Japan, expecting their first child, far away from the comforts and terrors of their native Virginia.

It’s not accurate to say that I was “homeless” most of my childhood, even though we lived in Japan (three different times), Texas, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Virginia, all before my fourteenth birthday. Not even the word “nomad” works, since nomads often carry their homes with them. Perhaps we were more like immigrants who leave everything behind but their most prized possessions and their roots.

Like those immigrants, my parents knew that they didn’t have to own a home to make one. Home is culture, tradition, and memory—not mortar. For my mother, that meant carving out a routine as reliable as an atomic clock, building a universe of belonging around my brother and me. With each move, she furiously stamped her imprimatur upon the cookie-cutter military base housing, making each place unmistakably ours. She adorned the walls with her framed needlework and hung my father’s painting of Jesus—with long, dark hair, brown eyes and tanned skin—to bless our dining room table. She filled the air with the aromas of her Southern cooking, especially on Sundays, when the table was lavishly spread with roasts and potatoes, gravies and collards, pound cake and the sweetest tea on earth.

She was the Kool-Aid mom, and ours was the house where our friends were welcome. She was the Girl Scout leader and den mother; my father coached my brother’s baseball teams. Long after we should have outgrown them, my brother and I are still partial to taking Sunday drives.

We were a team when we were traveling, like astronauts cocooned in a capsule, as we crisscrossed the country three times before I was ten. My dad always seemed to sit a bit taller when he was behind the wheel of his Buick (the only brand he’d ever drive), taking us sightseeing around the base or venturing off-base to the markets, or Shinto temples, or White Sands or ancient desert caverns or the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic. He was always on the lookout for the mighty forces of man and nature, pointing to a suspension bridge or a fighter jet or water tumbling over shorn cliffs, and saying to us, “That’s a dangerous thing!”

My brother delighted at the hint of threat. At an Okinawan festival, he’d watch a habu (a deadly Asian serpent) attack a weasely mongoose or gargantuan Sumo wrestlers face off on television and ask my dad, “Is that a dangerous thing?” My dad would laugh and nod. For us, dangerous things were strangely reassuring, as long as they loomed outside of the fortress of our family—the way listening to thunder as you snuggle beneath the covers can make you feel both lucky and safe.

Not counting Christmas, moving day was the most exciting day of the year. When the van would pull up into the driveway, my brother and I would be as giddy as ferrets. After school, we couldn’t run home fast enough to push open the door and squeal through a completely empty house. The size of the rooms doubled in their emptiness, and the stripped walls threw back our voices.

As we got older, moving meant a time for reinvention, a chance to reset our lives. When we move to Florida, I’m going to ask mom if I can do my own hair. I’m going to start a babysitting business in Virginia. When I get to the States, I’m going to learn how to dance.

Of course, there was the grief of leaving behind all that had become familiar. My last day at school would be full of hugs and tears and signatures in slam books like “Stay sweet and crazy. Friends forever.” But the sadness was always tempered by the extraordinary realization that I had best friends all over the world. I just hadn’t met them yet.

Wherever we went, I knew it would be home in no time at all.

Now, I have resided in Michigan for thirty years. It’s where I became a writer, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. My children have lived their entire lives in the same town with their aunts, uncles, and grandparents just one house away. They are still in touch with their kindergarten best friends. They have roots. I guess that means that after all of my girlhood travels, I am finally rooted, too.

Yet, I still have a moment of hesitation when people ask me where I’m from. Am I from Japan, the country of my birth and the place I spent the bulk of my childhood? Am I from Detroit, which has been home to me for three decades? Or is it Virginia, where my lineage seeps down into the soil, and where my heart keeps migrating in my dreams?

Over the past six years I’ve moved four times, each time with fewer belongings in tow. At fifty-six, the moves have not been filled with the excitement that I felt when I was a little girl. They have been stressful and anxiety-ridden, precipitated by divorce, unemployment, foreclosure, and family demands. Each unmooring has felt more like amputation than opportunity. Now I think, I’m too old for this.

My parents, however, have stopped moving. For all of their desire to escape Virginia, they returned in 1974 when my dad retired from the air force. For the past forty years, they have lived just an hour from Waverly. They are salmon who, after battling upstream most of their lives, have returned to the river of their birth.

Now in their eighties, they are clinging to their independence. My father is making a go of it, but his short-term memory has trapped him in a constant loop of remembering and forgetting.

My mother is living, once again, with ghosts. She sees her mother’s face come alive in pictures on the wall. Strange figures enter her room at night to loom over her bed. Children she doesn’t recognize scale the steeples of pines in the backyard. As her life gets emptier, the spirits are crowding. This time, they haven’t come to save her.

Dementia, it turns out, is the one dangerous thing that has finally penetrated the sanctum of their home.

I go to check on them often. During a recent visit, my mother suddenly gasped as we were watching TV. I gazed at her expectantly to see what she was going to say. These days, sudden memories and secrets tumble out as her mind wanders, uninhibited. I braced myself, but she said nothing as she looked around the den wide-eyed.

The room has remained pretty much unchanged since I was in high school. The elm coffee table and matching end tables came with them from Japan, replete with inlaid marble and three-dimensional carvings of feudal life. Over the sofa hangs my mother’s framed needlework, a peacock with a fan of magnificent feathers. The fireplace is adorned with figurines, pottery, and silk flowers. Every other wall in the room is plastered with family pictures that go back as far as my great-grandmother’s generation.

Only a couple of pictures survive from my mother’s childhood. The largest is one of little Bobbie and her father Junious at the county fair the year he died. His eyes are wide and all-seeing, but his spirit is silent. There is no hammering at the back door, no furious warnings in the night.

As we sat there, my mother gazed at her ark of memories, all of her beloved tchotchkes. Then she turned to me, her eyes as scared and lonely as a lost child’s.

“Whose place is this?” she asked. “When are we going home?”

Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist, and Detroit community activist whose fiction dives unflinchingly into the intersection of racism and sexism. Her first book, Know the Mother, was published in 2016. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. She is currently a Kimbilio fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers, and was a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow.

A Family Business

Jane Wong

How to lob an egg into a parking lot: Wait until it’s dark, settled-in dark, not sunset dark, say, 9 p.m. The sound of breaking is better when you can’t see it happen. When your father isn’t looking, go to the fridge and steal two eggs from the bottom of the carton stack and wrap them in a small towel, folding the towel like you would an origami cup. Sneak out through the back of the restaurant, mind the potholes, and circle around front to the parking lot. Unfold the towel and give your little brother one egg. When he says the egg is too cold and smells rotten like unbrushed teeth, tell him to shut up. Ground your heels into the gravel, as you imagine baseball pitchers do to gain traction. Give all your anger up to the egg. Breathe your hot breath on it. Hold it up to the sky like an offering, a sacrifice, this careful thing that could have grown into something else. Tell your brother there is nothing to be afraid of. Tell him to stop shaking. With your arm bent back at 45 degrees, hurl the egg high into the air, into an arch any city would welcome as a bridge. Hurl the egg and do not think about anything—not about how your father disappears for weeks to gamble in Atlantic City, not about how your mother crushes cockroaches with her fist—no, nothing at all. You must give the egg all of it. You can open your eyes or close them; it won’t matter since you won’t see it land. But, you will hear it. You will hear your brother squeal like a pig at mealtime. You will hear the splat—the crepuscular glob of the yolk spreading across the hood of a car. Poor car, you’ll think, poor, stupid car.

How to lock your brother in the meat freezer: Say the following with love and intention:

How to be in Alaska: You live on the other coast, the Jersey side, and the wildest thing you’ve ever seen was a goose eating chips at the beach. But in the velvet cold of winter, in sad February, you can escape anywhere. You can be transported to the other side of the country. To travel, you must wait until closing time, around 11 p.m. when the parking lot empties and your mother begins shaking the ants out of the MSG bin. Pull on your boots and grab two brooms from the supply closet and run outside. Ask your brother where he’d like to go. Alaska, he’ll say, arms high in the air as if a puffin would adopt him any second. Earlier, at lonely 5 a.m., before you woke up, a snowplow’s jaw pushed all the snow from the lot up against the street lamps. Take your brother’s arm and give him a broom, bristle side-up. Don’t ruin the expedition, you’ll say, or I’ll send you back to Jersey. As if Jersey was punishment enough. With the alien light of an Alaskan sun, dig the end of the broom into the hard snow—a mix of ice, gravel, and car oil. Climb up the mound, declaring coordinates along the way. 64.2008°N, 149.4937°W! At the top, sit with your little brother, your back against the street lamp, the bare warmth of electricity running through this conduit, this lifeline. Close your eyes, frost thickening along your lashes. Imagine what it feels like to be so far away from home. To leave this strip mall, this state, this way of life. Imagine traveling to places beyond Alaska—Hong Kong, Seoul, Cairo, St. Petersburg. Vow to leave Jersey the instant you graduate high school; link your two pinky fingers together and promise yourself to leave. As you fall asleep, surrounded by glaciers and your mother’s sharp voice slicing through the ice, your brother declares everything he wants to see right now: sand, yak, mud, ice, caribou, polar bear, volcano, fox, rainbow fish, ants, ants, ants.

How to pretend to fall asleep so your mother picks you up: