Stateway's Garden Read online

  Jacob’s lips turned into pink purse clasps. He listened for movement on the other side of the door and heard the sound of chair legs grinding against the floor. “Somebody’s right there,” he said.

  Tracy back-vaulted from the gate again and planted himself next to him. “I can hear her and Laney talking now,” he said.

  “What’s happening, what they saying, can you hear what they saying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Tracy.”

  Tracy forgot his intimidation, lifted his frozen right hand, and knocked on the door. He thought of how painfully cold the wood was against his knuckles. Jacob watched his brother standing there, icy from having no jacket, eyes watering from wind and knocking on the door in his place. He swiftly moved toward Tracy. The two began knocking in unison. Three knocks and then a pause. Three knocks. Pause. As they both lifted their arms again, ready to assail the door with whatever they had, they heard something and stopped.

  It was the door being unlocked.

  * * *

  SOLANE HAD BEEN resting against the kitchen wall for nearly five minutes. No longer breathing heavily, she checked her hands, making certain of complete dryness. She tilted her head upward and was staring at the housing of the kitchen’s single bulb. When it began to burn her eyes, she closed them. It wasn’t a blink. She held them and was counting the little glowing spots that appear after gazing at lights too long. She followed those spots in each direction and thought about the small puddles of water left on the kitchen and living-room floors. She stood upright, turned left, went to the closet, and grabbed the dry mop positioned upside down. Its handle was inside a blue bucket.

  “I just want you to finish school if you can,” she said while standing inside the closet.

  Stephanie changed position in the chair. She didn’t want to admit to herself that the sound of her sister’s voice had untangled her. Yet it surely had. Solane’s words calmed her and helped ease her breathing.

  “Lane, I know.” She exhaled while speaking. “But, just think about it, I sometimes miss four and five days a month for us anyway. And still get good grades.”

  “I know you help me a lot, Steph.” Releasing the word help made Solane think maybe Stephanie was right, maybe she did subconsciously fear her sister making certain mistakes, of becoming a replica she unconsciously helped create. She believed she trusted Stephanie to make the flawless choices she hadn’t, that with each day of school missed while babysitting children, Stephanie doubled her efforts in class the next. At least four days a week—most often five even if school was missed—she would be planted on the living-room couch or floor upon Solane’s return from an interview, or from day-work paying just above minimum wage, the two-hour journey from Tinley Park requiring a cavalcade of buses, Stephanie’s narrow little head blowing through a geometry or science book. Not once had Solane considered that maybe Jacob left twenty minutes earlier, and that “gotdammit” they hadn’t been careful. “I should’ve never been taking you out of school,” she said. With her hand on the mop’s handle, she pulled it close, placing the other on the middle of the wood, and began sliding it back and forth along the beige concrete floor with the precision of a high-school janitor. “I’m…” She paused. “Sorry.”

  Stephanie stood slowly. The chair made a screeching sound as it scraped the floor. Solane continued pushing the mop back and forth, re-wetting dried spots.

  “What should I do?” Stephanie asked. She took a glance at the door and back to her sister.

  “I never told you, but every time you miss school I think about it.” Solane didn’t look at her while speaking. “Every time.”

  “Lane, stoppit.”

  Stephanie moved closer but not close enough to touch her. The mop was no longer moving. That banging at the door came again, almost thundering, as though there were three or four or five hands hitting the wood simultaneously. Neither of them turned their heads from the other.

  Solane placed both hands on the top of the handle. “You never answered the question.”

  “I’m not sure if I am yet.” Stephanie pushed the chair farther away. It noisily scratched the floor again. She tried pretending not to notice her sister’s brown forearms protruding. “I don’t know for sure. I’m just late.”

  Solane lifted and slapped that mop’s head to the floor. Maybe she thought it was her hand against her sister’s face. Using the mop, she began carving a box in the concrete of the floor, a box containing her, subtracting her sister, with exact shifts of the pole in each direction. She mopped just in front of Stephanie’s uncovered feet, white nail polish not attracting the slightest trickle of water, then looked up. “I think you should talk to him, Stephanie. You need to.” She drew another visible line separating them. “Y’all got into it and y’all should be figuring it out.”

  “But…” Stephanie backed away, making certain to travel opposite the door.

  Solane dropped the mop, which audibly bounced once on the floor. She turned the short corner to her right and placed her hand on the latch. “And I need you to do my nails too,” she said.

  However, when she lifted her head, Stephanie was standing almost directly behind her, rubbing her sweaty hands into each other. She unlocked and opened the door in one motion, with Jacob standing there shivering, his yellow skin now nearly pink. His hair no longer had its waves. Tracy was to his right, smiling shyly, hands in pockets. He wasn’t quivering from cold. He smiled at her completely, revealing all his teeth.

  “Hey, Laney,” he said.

  “Hey there, li’l Tracy.”

  He didn’t step inside, nor did Solane step out. They both merely took two steps each to their right, leaving Jacob and Stephanie in full view of each other.

  THE STATEWAY CONDO GENTRIFICATION

  Our mothers take credit, but in Stateway we raised ourselves. It was just the way of things. But by that time in my life, the ways and things that went on around the buildings weren’t so big because the most important job in the world became simply checking the mailbox in the morning.

  We lived in the biggest concrete building on Chicago’s South Side, on the fourteenth floor of the Stateway Gardens projects (3536 S. Federal, Apt. #1407). Our buildings were painted this grayish-white color that looked like dirty sheets bleached repeatedly. The only things that gave them color were the frequent sprays of neon graffiti or someone using one of the walls as a toilet to piss on.

  Our buildings were cities within the city. They surrounded you with many of the things that were needed, and more than most of the things you didn’t. The projects were the home of excess. Excess drinking, excess drug use, excess everything. The buildings were extremely tall, and when the wind blew, Chicago windy wind coming from the lake, you could hear a whistling whirl that sounded like a basketball referee calling a foul. I’d step each day onto our porch, everyone on our floor’s porch that is, whistling with that wind on my way to school.

  Truth is, I hardly went to school much by then. There was no reason to. However, while standing outside, more than one hundred fifty feet high in a project building in Chicago, you can get all the geography lessons you’ll ever need. It was no different than living in those condos that weren’t more than four miles north of us on Michigan Avenue, and I compared our place to them often. But on each floor of our building, even the second, which was maybe ten or so feet from the ground, there were iron bars in the porch openings, including cracks that large rats slipped through easily. Those bars kept you inside like a prison. One entry and one exit in the projects. I didn’t even know there really were such things as back doors and back porches and backyards unless I was dreaming about moving to the suburbs. Every banister in the stairwells was made of iron as well and turned so cold in winter you were safer not holding on to it but just putting your hands in pockets and walking down slowly. Didn’t want to freeze the blood in your fingertips. Someti
mes, right after I’d leave for school, the few times I went, or wherever I was heading that morning after checking the mailbox, I’d walk around the corner of the porch, which we called “the ramp,” just analyzing the place. There were three apartments on each side and from any gate on the porch the view was admirable. Probably was the closest I’d ever come to standing inside a skyscraper’s observatory.

  I wasn’t allowed to enjoy any of that until I did my job, though. Each morning, before going on with my day of no school, I was expected to check the mailbox to see if our letter came. I didn’t use the elevator because I was able to hop flights of stairs as though they were single steps on a line. If my mother showed after work, the random times she did show, and I didn’t have a status report on the letter, the frown on her face would last a while.

  We were waiting on a letter from the government explaining when we’d finally be able to move.

  Mother said this housing letter would be different from others, would be addressed to her, in her full name, complete with the middle as well, and if it was the right one all our names would be spread across the top left corner like we were actors on a playbill. So each morning, I kept looking.

  Our mailbox was probably the same as any of those in the downtown high-rise condos. Just a bit dirtier. Each of our boxes was dull metal, just like the gates, and separated by no more than an inch from the others. The apartment number was etched on its face and it took a key as large as those for the front door to open it. Most days there would be very little in there: sales-papers telling about meat prices at the Fairplay grocery store, advertisements for new television and VCR combos, campaign flyers from aldermen saying they wanted to “help us” or that they were “on our side,” and white postcards usually from some Chicago bank or real estate company, with pictures of missing white kids on them. They used those kinds of things to make their businesses look better. I’d just throw it all on the concrete and race back up the stairs.

  You could see the entire city from our fourteenth-floor ramp: the Sears Tower and Soldier Field, the Hancock Building and Chinatown, and on clear days, really clear days when it hadn’t rained or snowed in weeks, I know I saw Minnesota. They say that’s where my father moved to. But I would simply settle for what was right in front of me: Comiskey Park. Looking from the ramp-porch you could imagine that although you lived in the projects, you were still privy to the prettiest skybox seat the ballpark could offer. There, you saw the vivid blues, greens, and silvers of fireworks after a home run was hit. At fifteen years old, I’d sit and stare in position, then begin walking back and forth on each end of the ramp during a game like it was my apartment, sipping a beer with my friend Kevin, all while making believe we were viewing the game from our condo’s porch. I had my first drinks with him. He started coming up the stairs with something he’d taken from his apartment, from his father especially, and we’d sip it like we were already grown men. And he was in a similar situation as me, except his father was around most of the time. Kev said often that he wished he wasn’t around. I didn’t know why and didn’t ask. We didn’t talk about those sorts of things.

  We were both only teenagers but had the project friendship of fifty-year-olds. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, if we could when the White Sox were playing at home, we grabbed the metal folding chairs from our apartments, which usually had big gashes in the plastic of the backrests, sat back quietly, and watched the game. Sure, we couldn’t see that much. But we’d sip our beers slowly and maybe take a shot or two of vodka. We hoped to get the good beers—some days we even lucked up on Coors Light or Pabst—but there was no real preference on what kind we drank. We weren’t able to be choosy. When Kev’s father had nothing in stock, we got our game beer by snatching it from someone walking out of the liquor store. We took a lot of things from drunk people walking out of that liquor store. We did whatever we had to in order to get our beer: pay people we knew to buy it, or simply snatch a case from one of the coolers in the gas station on the other end of Michigan Avenue where the real condos were. We’d walk quickly back to the building once finished, never running because that made us look obvious to police.

  The buildings of our housing-project complex were evenly spaced from one another. There were six total. The 3520 and 3550 South State buildings were not as tall as ours. They were only ten floors. In fact, if you went to the top floor of one of the shorter buildings, maybe even jumping up and down on the roof containing heat generators and enormous amounts of bird shit, you couldn’t see anything. Especially not the baseball park. Those two buildings were decorated in the same graffiti-piss as others and my brother spent the majority of his time in them.

  Jacob was not like me. We had different fathers and didn’t look much alike. He didn’t think like me and most of the time ignored me every chance he got. Well, unless he wanted something. My brother was older and took pride in being the project guy everyone wanted to know or be like. He didn’t steal, but sold very small amounts of drugs in the shorter buildings ’cause the girls were cuter over there from what he said. Those buildings were located on the busy side of State Street. The money he made was usually just enough to buy Reeboks and Levi’s and Gucci gold chains that made him look warm when he stood under buildings in the cold. Most times, you could find Jacob in one of the hallways with something in his hand that should not have been. By then, his true hobby was trying not to get teenaged girls around the buildings pregnant. He had a couple scares but those didn’t change him much.

  On nights I’d be home with him I learned a lot about the things he did. He spoke with speed in run-on sentences you couldn’t write and hardly said anything pleasant to me: “What are you looking at get out of my way I have things to do I’m trying to get outta this place you’re gonna mess up my money, stupid,” he’d say. The entire time I was doing nothing but sitting on our scarred blue couch, which had a milk crate under the middle pillow because it sank. I was probably twenty feet away from where he was. He didn’t drink liquor because he said it messed up the skin. Even when I’d offer him something small like a beer or a shot of vodka he didn’t reply. He’d storm into our condo-apartment like selling a few drugs was a corporate job with the same sort of stress, slamming the door, yanking his coat, loosening his tie, heading to the kitchen. He wouldn’t look at me. Jacob simply grabbed the razor blade he stored atop the refrigerator and the measuring scale that was hidden in the back of the cabinet with pots and pans. I saw him use small Ziploc bags to package his product. They weren’t large enough to enclose a penny. He’d mumble under his breath in those extended sentences. Sometimes, after being ignored on the offer for a drink, I’d ask if he wanted to come out on the ramp to watch the game with Kev and me, to have a drink of vodka or beer, to talk about whatever, to be around each other. I was like everyone else in the projects: looking up to him as though his face was created by robots.

  My brother’s looks kept him even busier than the drug selling. Although he’d only come home for maybe two or three hours at most, package his stuff, change underwear, and maybe brush his teeth, the door would be knocked on within moments of his sitting at the table.

  Girls smelled him like flowers on Valentine’s Day or Jiffy mix and pinto beans. They’d bang at the door saying, “I know you’re in there,” and “I just wanna talk to you,” and “Don’t you miss me?” I’d continue sitting on the couch waiting until later when Kev and I would do our thing. My brother would get up from the chair, walk to the door, and look through the peephole. Said under his breath that he wanted to make sure it wasn’t the police. (Remember, there was only one entry and exit in the projects.)

  Jacob wasn’t that tall, average height at best, but usually made sure to have girls that were much shorter. He was slim with moonlit hair and pale skin that even as a black boy, if the sun hit his pointy nose from a certain angle, you’d swear he was Italian or one of the Hispanic boys from Marquette Park. The girl, whichever one it was t
hat week, spent whatever amount of time he allowed complimenting him. They would then move to our bedroom, which was really mine because he never slept there, and I’d hear the girl moaning.

  It was a routine for him. He didn’t look dark and rough and rugged like I did, or other project boys. There were no scars on his face. His hands were usually clean, and although he hardly spoke to me, when I’d hear him mumble those run-on sentences, he sounded as though he actually went to school. Or at least read a book or two. With all the noise you heard in our building it was easy to overlook a girl moaning in the bedroom with my brother while he used our apartment as a four-hour motel. The “L” would be flying by, children were in those dangerous halls probably playing an even more dangerous game, girlfriends yelled, boyfriends yelled back. Sometimes, you may have even heard a scream or two.

  In project buildings, people screaming didn’t mean much. As long as it wasn’t you, your mother, or your sister, you just carried on with what you were doing.

  * * *

  I’D STEP ONTO the ramp-porch wondering which section was best for me right then. Walking straight ahead to the north end gave the scenic view. It was my version of the true condo view. All you’d see from our Stateway phony-condo ramp was Lake Michigan. When I was stressed, whether day or night, and Kev wasn’t around, I’d grab a couple of whatever brand of beer was left in my stash, down one shot of vodka—if it was early (or two if it was late)—and use my chair to sit and watch seagulls flying above the water.

  The water in Lake Michigan is brown no matter what time of day or what season. However, if you tilt your head to the side while holding a beer in your left hand and the metal gate in the other, the color brown can be the most beautiful of them all. It doesn’t have the confusing or overrated artsy shade of sky blue. It’s hard and focused, and when you see the water bashing the shore as though in a fight, you may start to believe brown is the best color for everything anyway. In summer, you’d see people lying along the beach with their towels, others in their trunks swimming, laughing, playing, doing whatever people do on the beach for fun.