“You can call them every Saturday. And this is a perfect time to catch up on your reading.”
Nothing made me grind my teeth more than spending an entire summer in the City. I missed the chance to walk outside, to see sky and earth and trees. Lydia must have felt even worse, because there was no vacation for her at all. She had to enroll in summer school at Mecca University to retake two of the classes that she’d failed the previous year. She was diligent, rising at dawn. She would wake me and pad down the stairs, while I followed, wrapped in a blanket. In the kitchen, I begged for a cup of coffee, and she poured in cream and the brown sugar from the box saved for baking. She laid out bacon on a cookie sheet and mixed up biscuits, pressing them into a smaller pan. Soon, Mama would join us, scrambling eggs, pouring in the same heavy cream, sprinkling dried things and cheese into the mixture, and stirring up a large pot of grits.
Another hour, and Daddy would sit down to the hearty meal, still sleepy from a night working the emergency room. My mother would eat her bland breakfast, grits with a banana, and they’d read their identical morning papers, because neither liked to share. Before heading out to his practice, he would pause at the door of the kitchen, sniffing deeply. Bacon smelled so good, like the memory of young love.
“Your father thinks he’s a poet,” Mama would say.
“I was in another life,” he’d reply.
During the days, I surprised Mama by helping with housework before going off on my own to read. In the evenings, Lydia would sit on the living room couch and I’d settle between her knees on a floor pillow, and Lydia would scratch and oil my scalp.
“I’ma cut off all this hair, Ailey. I need me a curly wig.”
“Give me that comb so I can burn those strands. Don’t you put no roots on me.”
“You sound like Miss Rose! She’s always thinking somebody’s trying to root her!”
“Don’t she, though?”
We watched tapes of television shows that I’d recorded on the VCR. I had two years of Dynasty on tape, and I kept a running stream of commentary to catch Lydia up. Alexis Carrington was our girl. She knew how to fling insults and hands like she had some Black in her.
If we didn’t watch television, we went to our room, lay on opposites sides of Lydia’s bed, and took turns reading out loud to each other. Lydia had all of Alice Walker’s books, but The Color Purple was the one she’d read eight times. It was like visiting Chicasetta every time she read it. When it was Lydia’s turn, she had different voices for each character, and it was like when we’d gone to see the movie. I’d only been twelve, but that winter break Lydia had lied that she was taking me to see Out of Africa. Mama had quizzed us when we returned. What was the plot? It was about Africa, we said. Yeah, yeah, and a white lady and a white man. A love story, and it had a really nice ending. Happily ever after. We repeated the story at dinner, but when Mama went to the kitchen with the dishes, Coco had whispered she was onto us. She’d read Out of Africa, and unless the movie had seriously changed the story, it should have been depressing as hell. The protagonist had syphilis.
Nana returned from her vacation on Martha’s Vineyard in late August, a week before I began classes at my new school. The public schools already had started, and so had Lydia’s regular fall classes at Mecca. Nana called nearly every day, extending an invitation to me, but I didn’t want to give up my time with my sister. I finally had Lydia back, and if Mama didn’t exactly treat us as adults, she didn’t intrude on our time together. At Sunday dinners, Nana made her displeasure known. She gave monosyllabic answers when Aunt Diane or Malcolm tried to engage her in conversation and pushed away little Veronica when she tried to sit on her lap. And she made snide remarks about Lydia needing summer school. As for me, Nana monitored the amount of food on my plate. It wasn’t ladylike to take second portions, and my being tall couldn’t hide the fact that I should drop twenty pounds.
She waited until Mama served dessert before announcing she wanted to go home. Yes, now. No, she didn’t want to drink a cup of tea, and Daddy would sigh and push back his chair.
“All right, Mother. I’ll take you home.”
One evening in our room, I told Lydia I felt sorry for our grandmother. She didn’t have any old-lady friends to hang with, except Miss Delores.
“That’s because Nana’s a bitch.”
“Lydia!”
My sister put a hand to her mouth. She raised her eyebrows.
“Oops. Did I say that out loud?”