If These Walls Could Talk

by Bettye Griffin

Genres: African American; African American Women's Fiction; African American Romance

Synopsis

A Delightful Summer Read. --The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers Reuben and Camille have always been afraid to let their children play outside in their rough Bronx neighborhood. So when they see an ad for homes in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, they jump at the chance. Spirits are high--until Reuben loses his job. No one in Milo or Dawn's Brooklyn-based family has ever owned a house, and the Poconos seem perfect. But after they move in, it starts to look like their house was slapped together like a ham sandwich and isn't much stronger. Norman and Veronica are happy to leave Washington Heights for the country. . .and so are their relatives. Each weekend brings a parade of empty-handed guests expecting to be fed but not expecting to pitch in and help. Amid trials and triumphs, these families are about to discover that not all is perfect when your dreams come true. . . "[Griffin Is] A Budding Name In Mainstream African American Fiction." -- Chicago magazine "A compelling drama about three families striving for the American dream." -- Booklist

Release date: January 28, 2011

Publisher: Dafina

Print pages: 433

Sample

Dawn unlocked her mailbox and tossed the contents into her tote bag without even looking at it. She just wanted to get upstairs to her apartment, take off her shoes, and sit for a few minutes before starting dinner. Funny, but lately she’d been thinking about how nice it would be to retire, a notion rather premature for a thirty-seven-year-old who’d likely be working at least another twenty-five years.

By now she had a pretty good sense that those twenty-five years of middle age would hold nothing extraordinary for her—nothing other than an average life of subway rides, working five days a week, paying bills, and taking an annual vacation. After that she and Milo would probably retire to Delaware or the Carolinas for more of the same, with their lives brightened by visits of their grandchildren.

Lord, that sounds boring. But even as Dawn formed the thought she also knew that she, Milo, and their son, Zachary, ranked among the fortunate. She couldn’t really complain, at least not with any honesty, that they never did anything or went anywhere. They ate out most Saturdays, ordered takeout at least once during the week, usually on Fridays, and barely three months ago they enjoyed a week-long cruise to Bermuda, the latest in a string of annual vacations.

She knew that the terrorist attacks last month were behind her restlessness. They made her more acutely aware of all the things she wanted to do and places she wanted to see in her lifetime, and now she feared there wouldn’t be enough time. The people behind bringing down the Twin Towers might be poised to do something equally evil, like blowing up subway tunnels all over the city during rush hour. She could practically see the sand running through the hourglass of her life, and it was already almost halfway through—maybe more, if she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the thousands who perished that fateful Tuesday morning.

But how did that saying go? Something about life being short for everyone, but that its sweetness depended on each individual. If she’d fallen into a rut, she’d allowed it to happen. Maybe she’d do something different tonight after she finished the dishes, like mix a cocktail for her and Milo. Something different from the typical Rum and Coke or Vodka and Orange Juice, something a little exotic. They had some liquor in the cabinet that they rarely drank.

Dawn smiled faintly at that idea. Then, as she left the large mailbox vestibule, she noticed a large group of residents crowding around the two elevators. “What’s going on?” she asked no one in particular.

“The elevators,” someone answered. “Both of them are out of service.”

“Both of them!” Dawn shook her head in disbelief. “For crying out loud! And at this hour, with people just getting in from work. Do they say when they expect to have at least one of them running?”

She recognized the heavy, almost masculine voice of Gloria Hudson from the fifth floor. “They’re saying they don’t know. Can you imagine? And all that rent I pay every month.”

“I guess that means they’re both empty. They wouldn’t be so vague if somebody was stuck inside; they’d be trying to get them out,” Dawn said thoughtfully.

She found Gloria’s comment amusing, in spite of her annoyance at the situation. Gloria and her husband had lived in this building for over thirty years. They’d raised six children in a three-bedroom apartment and then downsized to a one-bedroom when the last of their offspring left home. This eighteen-story building and its twin next door had been constructed in the early sixties by Mitchell-Lama, a major player in building affordable middle-income housing in New York, and for that reason the tenants paid rents substantially lower than market rates. Dawn and Milo paid only $720 for a two-bedroom apartment with a terrace on the twelfth floor with fabulous views of the Manhattan skyline. She felt fairly certain that the Hudsons, with all their years of residence, paid less than five hundred for their one-bedroom. Gloria complained as if they paid three times that much. But Dawn did feel bad for Gloria who had to be near seventy, though her skin, like that of most black women, didn’t tell on her. She shouldn’t be forced to walk up five flights of stairs at her age.

Fortunately, Dawn noticed no other senior citizens among the group waiting in the lobby. Most of them did their errands and laundry in the morning and were back in their apartments by noon.

“My daughter told me they were out when she got home from school,” another woman said.

Dawn immediately thought of nine-year-old Zach. He’d called her this afternoon, as he did every day, to report he’d gotten home safely from school, and he didn’t mention anything about having to walk up twelve flights. Thank God he hadn’t been in one of the elevators when it stopped. She’d had that experience once when she was seven years old in the East New York housing project where she lived with her family, and the experience still traumatized her.

She had been trapped in that small, windowless box that smelled like pee and, to make it worse, the elevator light kept flickering off and on, sometimes leaving her in total darkness. She’d pressed and held the ALARM button, which drowned out the sound of her terrified screams. It had taken a very long hour for the maintenance staff to get her out, crying and shaken. For years afterward she never entered an elevator alone, and if the person with her got off below her family’s eighthfloor apartment she, too, would step out and take the stairs the rest of the way.

She sighed. She’d long since gotten over that childhood trauma, riding the building’s elevator alone again, albeit uneasily, from the time she became a teenager. Even then she’d realized she had no choice but to conquer her fear. People who lived in New York City had to deal with elevators, just as they couldn’t avoid going underground to ride the subway. There was no way around it, even if one had money.

No, that wasn’t right, she thought. Rich folks didn’t have to ride the subway, and they could avoid living in high-rises in favor of townhomes or brownstones, but chances were that wherever they had to go to earn those big paychecks was located many stories above street level.

The concept of wealth didn’t apply to her and Milo, anyway. They belonged to the great mass of middle-income citizens. Even if they lived in Westchester or Jersey and worked in one of those sprawling suburban complexes where people drove to work, their home life would almost certainly involve an elevator. Apartment living was a way of life for people like them who didn’t have thirty thousand dollars for a ten percent down payment on a house, plus thousands to put out for a monthly mortgage. Even those nice garden rentals in the suburbs she’d seen photographs of were well out of their price range.

Dawn looked down at her sneaker-clad feet, her footwear of choice while commuting. She carried heels in her wine-colored leather tote bag. It would be a long walk up twelve flights, but she gathered from the conversation around her that some people had already been waiting for over an hour. It was already past fivethirty, and she’d like to eat by seven. Besides, Zachary had been alone long enough. Best to begin the trek.

By the time she unlocked her apartment door Dawn felt like she’d gone ten rounds with Laila Ali. If she took those stairs once a day she’d probably lose those thirty pounds she wanted to shed . . . if she didn’t have a heart attack first.

“You home, Zach?” she called.

He emerged from his bedroom, relief etched on his young face. “Hi, Mom! You’re kind of late tonight.”

She could tell he’d started to worry. Staying in the apartment alone after school had been his idea; when school resumed last month he came to her and Milo and firmly stated he no longer wanted to spend afternoons at Georgiana Sanders’s apartment until they got home from work. Between the noise made by the numerous other kids there and Georgiana watching her soap operas with the volume way up so she could hear above the din, he said he couldn’t concentrate enough to do his homework.

Georgiana, like numerous other tenants in the two buildings, supplemented her family’s income by running a day care center out of her apartment, an enterprise both unlicensed by the state and prohibited by the building management. The terms of everyone’s lease contained a paragraph stating that apartments should not be used for commercial purposes. Georgiana cared for several small children all day, plus numerous older kids in the few hours between the end of school and their parents’ workdays. But Dawn and Milo suspected that Zach’s real reason for wanting out of day care was because his friends in the building all went home alone, some of them even responsible for supervising younger siblings, and he didn’t want to be teased for being a baby. But that didn’t change the fact that he was still only nine years old, city kid or not.

“The elevators are out,” she said to him now. “Both of them.”

“Really?”

“Yes, from what I heard you got upstairs just in time.”

She dropped her purse, tote bag, and jacket on the floor and plopped into a leather swivel chair in the large living room, breathing heavily, her long legs stretched out on the matching ottoman in front of her. She knew she couldn’t sit indefinitely, but she would give herself a chance to catch her breath before getting the meat loaf and sweet potatoes in the oven.

Her hand went to her scalp, which was wet with perspiration. At times like these she wished she wore her hair natural, so she could just get in the shower, wash out the sweat, and let it air-dry. Dawn wore her hair in a short pixie cut that required either a wet set or a wrap. The process really didn’t take long, but nonetheless she tried to limit it to once a week. She’d always believed that frequent shampoos were for those whose hair didn’t require chemical straightening.

She patted her ends, half-expecting to find them dry and brittle, but they remained silky smooth.

After a few minutes she began to cool off and smiled at her surroundings. Dawn loved her apartment. It had good-sized rooms and plenty of closet space, plus great views, although now she hated to look. The Manhattan skyline had been tragically altered just a month ago by those jets crashing into the World Trade Center, on the type of sunny, clear morning she hadn’t seen since. Now, instead of the two majestic Twin Towers, a massive cloud of dust hovered around the skies of lower Manhattan. She could see it both from here and when she emerged from the subway in midtown. It made her feel vulnerable, like her life could come to a sudden halt at any moment. She knew from talking to her coworkers that many of them felt the same way.

Dawn wondered if she would ever feel truly safe again. She found herself sneaking glances at fellow passengers on the subway as she rode to and from work. Were any of them packing bombs in their briefcase?

She achieved her greatest sense of safety and security here, in their roomy apartment in Williamsburg. So what if their landlord charged them an exorbitant fee during the summer months because they had air conditioners in the living room and both bedrooms? It beat sweating her hair out and being unable to sleep at night.

Another feature she considered a plus was that, unlike many of their friends’ apartments that had back-to-back bedrooms, the bathroom separated their bedroom from Zach’s. This arrangement provided Dawn and Milo with more privacy.

But the twin buildings were nearly forty years old and beginning to show their age. With the passage of time the elevators became less and less reliable. The Olympic-sized pool had long since been filled in with cement after the cost of membership privileges soared so high that few residents purchased them, making it too costly to operate at a profit. This had occurred long before Dawn and Milo moved in, and she regretted its having happened. A pool to cool off in during the often unbearable heat of July and August would be the cherry on the sundae.

Dawn loved New York, but sometimes she allowed herself to consider that if she and Milo lived just about anywhere else in the country they’d be able to have a house of their own instead of making their landlord richer with every rent check they wrote. They both made good money—she worked as a payroll supervisor, he as a programmer—but home prices in Brooklyn and the surrounding areas had gone through the roof. They weren’t alone in their housing dilemma; all of their family members and friends rented apartments. The waiting list to get into the two buildings of this complex numbered in the hundreds, unreliable elevators or not. Other than some of her coworkers who owned homes in central Jersey or out on Long Island, she didn’t know anyone who owned their own home, and she doubted Milo did, either.

But many city residents would consider them lucky, and she supposed they were. They had a good-sized terrace where they had a grill and a few pieces of patio furniture. Many people in New York who wanted to cook out had no recourse but to put tiny hibachi grills on their fire escapes.

By the time Milo staggered in the door she had dinner in the oven.

“That was rough,” he said between breaths.

“As best I can tell, the elevators went out around three-thirty,” Dawn said.

He collapsed into a chair, throwing his hip-length black leather jacket over his knees. At thirty-eight, he had put on weight in the past year, and the slight paunch of his belly rose and fell beneath the pullover sweater that covered his regulation shirt and tie. “This shit is for the birds. That’s the second time this month I had to walk up those stairs. I’m too old for this foolishness.” He removed his wire-framed glasses and wiped his face with his palms before replacing them.

“I’m disappointed, too. I’d planned on doing laundry tonight. I can’t do it without an elevator.”

“We probably ought to see about getting a washing machine. A lot of folks in the building have them, even though it’s against the building rules. Dishwashers, too.”

The owners of the buildings, like most who owned income-regulated rental units in New York, paid for their tenants’ water use, as well as their electricity. But prohibiting these machines had to do with the plumbing, which was as old as the rest of the building, and the concern that draining soapsuds from washers on higher floors could easily clog the pipes at the bottom, creating the need for costly repairs. Quite a few older buildings in the city weren’t zoned for individual washing machines including many prewar luxury apartments selling for seven figures. Of course, people who could afford to live in places that pricey had maids to make the trek down to the basement laundry room for them.

“But Milo, where would we put it?”

“It can sit right out in the corner of the dining room. It’ll be on wheels, so we can roll it to the kitchen sink when we need it. When they do the annual inspection we’ll put it out on the terrace and cover it up with something.”

“But if it’s out in the open anyone who comes over will see it. And what if Zach’s friends from the building come over while I’m washing a load? It’s too risky, Milo. Somebody will blab to the management.”

“Dawn, I really don’t think anyone cares. Look at Georgiana and all those other women who run day care centers out of their apartments. This isn’t Good Times, where Florida and James are always being threatened with eviction for breaking this rule or that rule. I always thought that was a stupid plot device, anyway. People don’t get evicted from the projects unless they’ve committed a major infraction, like going three months without paying their rent or something.”

“This isn’t a project, Milo.” Her voice came out sharper than she had meant it to, but as a child of the crime- and graffiti-ridden projects of East New York, she didn’t want anyone to infer that at this point in her life she still lived in a ghetto.

He looked at her through narrowed eyes. “So it isn’t a project. Don’t bite my head off, will you?”

“Sorry,” she said, and took a breath. “I’m just so annoyed. And I’m a little worried, too, about these buildings going downhill and turning into something just a step or two removed from the projects. The maintenance is really starting to get bad. Remember those times last winter when the boiler wasn’t working? Winter is coming, and we’ll probably freeze again this year.” She sighed. “What we really need is a house.”

“We could use the winning lottery numbers, too, if you’re granting wishes.”

“Seriously, Milo.”

“Dawn, you know damn well we can’t afford a house. Only rich people can buy houses, at least in this part of the country. People with incomes a lot higher than ours are renting.”

“I know people our age at work who have houses.”

“Yeah? How many of them are black?”

She hesitated just a moment. “A few.”

“Okay. And how many of these black home owners aren’t from the Caribbean?”

“Okay, you’ve got me there.” Dawn didn’t understand why such a great number of people from places like Jamaica or Barbados or Trinidad managed to amass more than the average African American. Popular culture viewed these islanders as exceptionally hard workers who weren’t averse to working two or even three jobs to earn their rewards in life. But she and Milo could hardly be called lazy. She’d worked steadily ever since graduating high school nearly twenty years ago, even putting in full days until her labor pains started with Zach, and returning promptly at the close of six weeks’ maternity leave.

Dawn had spent her entire career at the same company, starting out as a receptionist, then moving into payroll and working as a clerk, and finally interviewing for the supervisory position when it became available. Milo’s first foray into the workforce was at a paint factory. He’d quickly decided he didn’t want to stay on there, doing hard physical labor, the strong odor of paint doing God knows what to his lungs, collecting tiny annual cost-of-living increases until retirement. He enrolled in a community college, learned to write code, and after getting his associate degree he got a job as a junior programmer at an office machines manufacturer. The “junior” had long since been dropped from his title, and he’d done quite well.

But not well enough to be able to afford a home of his own.

“Have you seen the prices of homes lately?” he asked.

She unconsciously jutted out her lower lip, like a child who’d been told she couldn’t have the toy she wanted. “Well, I think we ought to start looking. I’m sure there’s something out there we can afford.”

It looked to her like their building had begun what would likely be a long slide downward, and she didn’t want to take the trip with it.

Camille stirred at the sound of the Lexington Avenue line elevated train. She rolled over and snuggled up to Reuben. He grunted in his sleep and otherwise ignored her.

She stretched lazily, then sat up and turned the alarm clock to the OFF setting. She set it only as a precaution; she rarely slept until it went off, even now that it was mid-October and still dark out when she arose. The return of Standard Time would change that, but that wouldn’t happen for another two weeks. She’d be glad to see it come; she much preferred getting up in the daylight. She could open the blinds and let the morning sunlight wake Reuben. He’d pull a pillow over his eyes, but his subconscious would know it was time to get up. She got tired of shaking him every morning like a bottle of soy sauce.

Carrying the underwear she’d laid out last night and wearing a bathrobe, she stepped out into the hall and crossed to the bathroom to take a ten-minute shower. As she scrubbed herself she mentally went over her personal to-do list. The cable bill was due this week. She had to make appointments for Mitchell and Shayla to get their six-month dental checkups. And she needed to see her hairdresser; her roots had grown in as tough as an overdone steak.

No, before she made the hair appointment she’d better remind her sister-in-law, Arnelle, about that fifty dollars she’d loaned her three weeks ago. Camille’s expression went momentarily sour when she thought about Arnelle, who usually excused her financial shortages with, “It’s hard trying to raise my daughter all by myself. You’re lucky to have a husband, Camille.”

Camille resented Arnelle for trying to make her feel guilty just for being married. She and her sister-in-law had been quite close earlier in Camille’s marriage to Reuben, more like sisters than in-laws, but all these repeated requests for forty dollars here and sixty dollars there, which Arnelle often conveniently forgot about come payday, had begun to put a strain on their friendship.

Camille felt pretty sure that Arnelle had already tried the patience of both her mother, Ginny, and her older sister, Brenda. She usually prefaced each loan request with, “Don’t mention this to Reuben, okay?” Well, once Camille got back this fifty she’d start telling Arnelle she couldn’t spare any extra. Just because she had Reuben’s income to help provide the necessities of life didn’t mean that her children didn’t need things just like anybody else’s kids, or that she should go around looking like a tackhead.

Still, she did feel sorry for Arnelle. Her daughter’s father had long since skipped out of New York for an unknown destination and hadn’t sent her a fat nickel since. At least Brenda’s ex-husband, that is, if they’d ever gotten around to getting a divorce, helped her with the support of their daughter.

Camille scrubbed her back vigorously. She’d just have to stop being such a soft touch . . . and stick to it.



Fifteen minutes later, all dried off and a bathrobe covering her underwear-clad body, she woke the children. When they finished washing up she’d wake Reuben. He hated having to wait to get into the bathroom, something he’d had to do as a child as one of four children, and he insisted it be all clear by the time he got out of bed, so he could get in there right away.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Camille thought dreamily, if their two-bedroom apartment had two bathrooms. The building’s owner, who also owned the sheet metal shop that operated on the ground level directly below them, had once lived in this apartment with his family. For that reason he had made a few nice improvements: butcher block kitchen countertops, an attractive laminate vanity cabinet under the bathroom sink, parquet floors, storm windows. She knew for a fact that the duplicate apartment across the hall had no special features, although admittedly it rented for less money. Once the building’s owner started making big bucks with his sheet metal business he moved his family to a condo on City Island, which, along with Riverdale, ranked among the nicest neighborhoods in the Bronx.

She and Reuben first heard about the apartment from Reuben’s brother Saul, who was working downstairs in the shop. Not long after Saul decided to quit and work at a larger shop near Willis Avenue. At the time Mitchell was just eighteen months old and Camille had just gotten a positive result on a home pregnancy test. They desperately needed something bigger than their one-bedroom in Gun Hill.

Camille, now dressed in a brown wool suit and crisp yellow blouse, her long hair pinned into a French roll to help disguise the fact that she was overdue for a visit to the hairdresser, prepared breakfast for the family in the kitchen. The kids had cereal with sliced banana, and she had a Waldorf salad with sweet apple slices, golden raisins, and chopped walnuts. Reuben didn’t eat breakfast on weekdays, at least not at home. He usually grabbed a croissant or one of those fried-egg sandwiches with bacon. Camille kept telling him that all that butter and cholesterol were bad for his heart, as well as making him gain weight, but he didn’t particularly enjoy fruit or cereal. “I ate oatmeal for breakfast every day when I was growing up, but my stomach cried out for eggs and bacon,” he always said.

At ten minutes to eight Camille kissed her family good-bye and left for work. She sighed when she stepped out into the street. The sunlight that came through her apartment windows was practically obscured by the shadow of the elevated train tracks a block away. She heard the wheezing of the train’s brakes as it pulled into the 161st Street station. Employees from the sheet metal shop congregated outdoors, sipping coffee in Styrofoam cups bought at the convenience store down the street, savoring the last minutes before they were due to start work. They would hastily toss their cups at about a minute or two before eight, and nearly half of them would miss the trash can, leaving the ground littered with white cups that would soon be flattened and dirtied by the shoes of passing pedestrians.

She walked briskly in the direction of the train station, suddenly anxious to get downtown. She always felt like this the moment she stepped out of her apartment, always had the same thought. If only she could lift their building and drop it in a nicer area, like Dorothy Gale’s house in The Wizard of Oz. Only instead of landing on the Wicked Witch of the North, she’d want to land on a nice block on City Island or in Pelham Bay, where the commercial space would be filled with upscale shops, including a bakery, which would not only be quiet but sweet-smelling.

Ah, if only. This was no way to live, surrounded by all this noise and ugliness. She could stand the noise from the sheet metal shop if she absolutely had to, but the neighborhood had not one single redeeming feature. The kids didn’t even have a park to play in. Mitchell wanted a bike, but Reuben said no because there was no place to ride it safely.

And Mitchell was now ten years old, just a leap away from puberty. He really shouldn’t still be sharing a bedroom with his younger sister at this stage of his life.

As she huffed her way up the steep stairs to the elevated train—she’d put on twenty pounds after giving birth to Mitchell and another twenty after she had Shayla, losing none of it—Camille suddenly had an idea. She’d call Reuben when she got to work.

No, she thought, better to wait. This needed to be discussed in person.



“Can I be excused?” Shayla asked.

Camille glanced at her daughter’s dinner plate. “You didn’t finish your lima beans.”

The seven-year-old’s face promptly wrinkled, like she wanted to cry.

“Don’t even try it,” Reuben warned. “You can do better than that, Shayla. Come on. Two more spoonfuls.”

“You can do it,” Mitchell called out, urging her on from the attached living room.

“Tell you what,” Reuben said. “Mommy and I have a surprise for you two, but neither one of you are going to get it until Shayla finishes her beans.”

Mitchell got to his feet. “Come, on Shayla! We’ve got a surprise coming. Don’t hold it up.”

Shayla stuffed the remaining lima beans in her mouth, her cheeks blowing up like a squirrel’s.

Reuben leaned forward. “You’ve got to swallow them, Shayla, not just hold it in your mouth.”

“Chew them quick, Shayla,” Mitchell urged. “Otherwise they get nasty.”

Her mouth full, Shayla mumbled a response that sounded like, “They are nasty.” She shut her eyes tightly, held her nose, and swallowed.

Camille didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath. She’d never been too fond of lima beans as a child, either, but she wanted her children to eat a balanced diet and never be troubled by obesity, and she’d read someplace that limas were stuffed with vitamins. She figured twice a month wouldn’t hurt.

“Okay, Daddy, what’s our surprise?” Mitchell asked anxiously.

Reuben pointed his chin toward the vacant chair of the dinette set. “Sit down, Mitchell.”

Their son did as he’d been instructed, his eagerness demonstrated by the way he leaned forward.

“Okay, kids,” Reuben began. “You know that your Great Aunt Mary passed away last month.”

“She was real old,” Mitchell said matter-of-factly.

“Yes, she lived a full life,” Camille said. “May she rest in peace.”

“I’m sure you guys remember how our family used to help Aunt Mary out,” Reuben continued. “Y’all used to come along with me sometimes, to bring her to run her errands and things.”

Both children nodded, confusion in their eyes. Camille knew they both wondered what the recently departed Aunt Mary could possibly have to do with their surprise.

Reuben promptly cleared up their uncertainty. “Well, Aunt Mary appreciated us so much that she left us some money.”

Camille enjoyed the kids’ wide-eyed expressions.

“You mean we’re rich?” Shayla asked.

Reuben chuckled. “No, not by a long shot. But it does mean that we’ve got some extra money. And Mommy and I decided that it’s high time we got you guys down to Disney World for a vacation.”

He and Camille beamed at each other as the children digested this news, jumping out of their chairs and whooping like Indians, clapping their hands over their mouths.

“I’m gonna see Minnie Mouse!” Shayla exclaimed happily.

“When do we go?” Mitchell asked.

“The week after Thanksgiving,” Camille said. “You’re going to have to miss