Mia McKenzie - The Summer We Got Free

for Franny ,Nana and Pop-Pop

and all the people, livingand dead, who helped me get free

1976

A va did not remember the taste of butter. It had beenseventeen years since she had last moaned at the melt of hot-buttered cornbreadon her tongue. She was not bothered in the least about it, because she did notknow that she did not remember. At breakfast, when she dropped a square of butteron grits, or on yams at dinner, and laid a spoonful of either on her tongue,she believed what she tasted was butter. She did not know that she was only tasting milkfat and salt,the things that make up butter, which, of course, is not the same thing. Shecertainly did not know that the taste of butter was a thing that had once madeher moan. Ava did not remember what it was to moan.

Standing at thegreen-checkered, Formica-topped table in her parents' kitchen, on a drizzlySaturday in August, Ava spread butter thickly on a slice of toast and yawnedheavily. It was just after four in the morning and she was still in hernightgown, a pale yellow, plain thing, and her hair was tied up under akerchief. She was thirty years old, but she looked and felt years older,especially on mornings like this one, when the damp got into her elbows andknees and the joints of her hands, down in the marrow, and settled there.Buttering the toast, her fingers felt stiff and unwilling.

She placed the toast on a plate in front of herhusband, Paul, who smiled tiredly up at her from his seat at the table.

"You look half asleep," she told him, as shepoured him more orange juice.

"I'malright," he said, chewing slowly.

They had beenmarried four years and this was one of their rituals. Whenever Paul took anight shift at the cleaning company where he sometimes worked, he had to skipdinner. By the time he got home in the morning he was exhausted and didn't wantto eat a whole meal and go to bed on a full stomach, so Ava got up early andmade him a couple of slices of toast, and she sat with him while he ate. Whenthey were first married, he took night shifts often, but over the years thatfollowed he had taken them only when they needed extra money for somethingspecific. Lately, though, in the last few months, he had been picking them upafter his regular shifts at the hotel, where he worked full-time. This changehad come about because he had finally secured a long-time-coming promotion atthe hotel, to day manager, and between the two of them they were making enoughmoney to afford their own house, and Paul was picking up the night shifts forextra money for a down payment. Twice in the last week he hadn't gotten homeuntil nearly dawn, and once they had only had time to kiss goodbye as Avapassed him on her way out to catch her bus to work at the museum.

"We gotjam?" Paul asked.

Ava shook her head. You asked me that already.

I did? he asked, his eyes red and half-closing.

"Youworking too much."

He rubbed hiseyes and some of the butter from his fingertips left a tiny smear on hiseyelid. "How we gone get a house if I don't work?"

"We alreadygot a house," Ava said.

Paul sighed andstuffed what was left of his toast into his mouth. "This aint our house,Ava," he said thickly.

Ava took thelast slice of toast from the toaster and buttered it, thinking about this houseand her husband's renewed determination to leave it, which she did not share.She had lived here almost her entire life, since she was four years old. Andwhile she could not remember very much about her early childhood here, shecould remember some things, like the day, twenty-six years ago, when they movedin, when she first saw the red wallpaper, which her parents had hated, butwhich Ava thought, and later convinced them, was the most perfect wallpaper anyonehad ever hung. It had faded in only the last seventeen years as if it had beenfifty years, and a grayness now lived inside the red.

Still, Ava had grown up playing hide and seek under this very counter where she now stood butteringPaul's bread, and playing jacks on this floor, underneath the kitchen tablewith her siblings. If she tried very hard, she could almost, but not really,remember how the jacks sounded when they scraped against the linoleum, and howthe ball bounced. But the luster on the tiles was gone now, and whenever yousat a heavy dish on the green-checkered table it wobbled on its rusty legs. Theglass vase that had sat for years in the table's center, which had been givento her parents by Miss Maddy, their across-the-street neighbor and then-friend,had held flowers from her mother's bushes out in the backyard. Yellow roses,fat and lush as bowls of paint. Their fallen petals like paintdrops on the tabletop. But the rosebushes were gone now, too, abandoned to the massof strangling weeds that had suffocated the rest of the flower garden, and thevegetable garden, and had even attacked the back porch, where the weeds hadcrept over the banisters and up through the floorboards, which were loose anduneven now, just as they were in every room of the house.

And indeed there was an unevenness about the houseitself, an eccentricity in its character, an imbalance in its light and air, sothat in the daytime the sunlight coming in through the windows only cast itselfinto certain areas of a room, and avoided others, so shadows fell in odd ways,elongated in the wrong places or unnaturally cut in half. And when a gust of suddenair, sometimes hot, other times frigid, entered or left a room for no reason,as often happened, it sometimes took a persons breath away.

But Ava had been read stories at bedtime, and lostbaby teeth, under this roof. She had bled like a woman for the first time here,and for the last. And though it had been years since she had known any real joywithin these walls, any bliss, years even since shecould clearly remember old joys and blisses, she still felt a connection to thehouse, and a kinship with it.

Ava handed Paul the last piece of toast, then turnedback to the counter to wipe away the crumbs there. Paul watched her whilechewing. He did not understand why she felt so strongly about this one thing,about not leaving this house. Indifference was usually the most apparentfeature in Ava's personality. It was a fact about her that Paul had noticedwhen they had first started going together, nearly five years ago now. Sittingon the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they had both worked, eatingbeef stew Ava had brought from the cafeteria where she was a server, Paul hadinvited her to see Buck and the Preacherwith him after work.

"Alright," she'd said.

"You likeSidney Poitier?" hed asked her, grinning, happy.

She shook herhead. "Not that much."

"Oh. Hisgrin slipped. "Well. We can see something else."

"No, it'sfine," Ava had said. "Anything is fine."

He had likedthat quality in her then, because he had mistaken it for easy-goingness and hedidn't like fussy women anyway, women who had to have everything just so. Overtime, though, he had come to see the downside of it. It wasn't that she alwaysagreed with him about things. She didnt. But when she disagreed she neverargued, and Paul felt this was because, whatever her opinion on a particularsubject, she never felt strongly about it, and certainly not enough to fightover it. In all the time they'd known each other, they had never had a realfight. Paul tried to pick fights with Ava, sometimes, when he was very angry orfrustrated about something and needed a fight. But as soon as he raised hisvoice she would completely lose interest in whatever they were talking aboutand he would be left even more frustrated than when he started. It was onlywhen it came to the subject of leaving this house that Ava wasuncharacteristically vehement. Not in her tone, because she would not fightabout it, but in her consistency. No matter what Paul said, no matter how muchhe insisted over the last four years, Ava would not even consider leaving thathouse.