The girl with the purple hair at Andrew’s address in Philadelphia was named Aleta, and though she first regarded me with suspicion, she eventually opened the door for me when I told her who I was and what I was after.
“Yeah, Andrew used to live here, but not for a long time,” she said as I stepped inside. “I doubt I can help you much.”
I tried not to feel disappointed. Duke the dog slipped past me as I entered, and while Aleta tried to coax him back in, my eyes took in the sight of the row house’s dim interior. Overstuffed furniture covered in bright, exotic blankets filled the small living room, whose stucco walls had been painted deep crimson. A Moroccan lantern, wired with flickering chandelier bulbs, sent patterns of light and shadow dancing over it all, including a dusty TV that sat inside a fireplace no longer in use. The bricks of the fireplace were painted black and graffitied with names in various colors. I looked for Andrew’s among them, finding his loose cursive squeezed between inscriptions of “Remy” and “Waif.”
“Our guest book,” Aleta explained. “Housemates, friends, sons-a-bitches.” She had given up on the dog, leaving the front door open a crack for when he decided to come back in. “Want some coffee?”
I nodded, even though I never drank the stuff back home. Momma always bought the cheapest brand. But I was taking risks now. Time to try something new. “You can tell me about Andrew,” I said aloud.
Aleta smiled, which made the most of her high cheekbones and white teeth. Even in her wrinkled kimono she looked regal, like a New Wave version of Diana Ross, and I felt intrigued. I followed her into the kitchen in back and sat down at the table there. Sunlight streamed through a sliding door, its cracked glass mended with electrical tape. The zigzag shadow it makes on the dirty wooden floor reminded me of the crack in our kitchen wall back home. I looked away. There were dishes in the sink and crumbs on the counter, the whole place the kind of dirty that would send Momma into a rage, the kind of mess I had tried hard not to let build up back home ever since Daddy left us years ago. But I didn’t want to think about home, so I kept my eyes on Aleta, who’d put a small pitcher of water in her microwave to nuke. I was surprised to find she ground her own beans in a small electrical contraption. When I asked, she told me that the metal and glass pot she was rinsing out was something called a French press.
“Andrew always used to sing my praises when it came to coffee,” Aleta told me. As she spooned the freshly ground coffee into the pot, its scent reached out to me, earthy and sweet. “That’s how we met,” Aleta continued. “The place around the corner where I work. He’d pretend to do his homework, I’d sneak him free refills, and soon he’d be so buzzed he’d flirt with every guy in the place, gay or straight. But maybe that was thanks to the Jim Beam in his backpack.” She sighed.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear all this. But I guess I needed to. “Sounds like you know him pretty well.”
“Guys. They are so useless.” She shot me a smirk as she took two glass mugs from the dish drain and sat them on the table. “Give me a strap-on any day.”
I thought again of Charlie last night, and the blood rushed to my ears like it always does when I feel awkward or put on the spot. The microwave dinged, and I was glad when Aleta turned away. I watched her fetch an oven mitt from a drawer and take out the pitcher, watched her pour the hot water into the press pot. By the time she brought the press pot and a couple spoons to the table, my face had settled back into itself
“Give it a minute, then press down on it,” she said, gesturing at the arm of the pump, which stood above the black lid of the pot like a metal lollipop.
“How long ago did Andrew move out of here?” I asked.
“Oh, girl. You know what he’s like, right?” She poured some milk in a measuring cup. “When he gets a new boyfriend he forgets everything else. Like rent. Like telling us he’s moving out.” She pulled from a drawer another gizmo, a battery-operated mixer no bigger than a screwdriver, which she put in the milk to froth it up to three times its size. “That room of his is still not rented out, and it’s been, what, going on a year? And now everybody just throws their shit in there.” She collapsed dramatically into the chair across from me. “Who will finally clean it? Me. Have to take care of everything like I always do.”
“I know what that feels like.” I put my hand on the black knob of the press pot. “Now?”
“Not yet.” She unlatched the sliding door beside her and slid it open. Outside, in a small garden, drooping pink hydrangeas clustered against the foot of a rickety fence covered in ivy. Beyond it, an old brick row house maintained a precarious state of deterioration. “Anyway,” Aleta continued, “first it was Ethan. For a month or so Andrew practically moved in with that jackass, using his room upstairs as nothin’ but a clothes closet. I should know. ‘Is me who took Waif’s room across the hall when she went whack and ended up in the nut house, you know what I’m saying?”
I had no idea where she was going, but I nodded nonetheless.
“But then Ethan and Andrew go ‘poof’, and finally Andrew’s back here, a parade of losers at his heels. Lemme tell you, if I’d a put a turnstile on his door and charged five bucks a throw, our rent troubles would of been a thing of the past. But then here comes Steven and it’s true love all other again. Andrew moves out--forgets to tell us, as I’ve mentioned--but then bam!, yet another fiasco.”
I realized my fingers were still hovering atop the press pot. “Now?”
“Let it steep, will you?” She pushed my hand away and flicked a strand of her purple hair out of her eyes. “Only this time it’s worse, ‘cause Andrew doesn’t even go into work at the museum, so they start calling us because he hasn’t bothered to give ‘em the new number and none of us know it. Remy, who lives
gotten high or something and killed Andrew or driven him to suicide. Yo, it’s like that Waif shit all over again, yet another ‘can open, worms everywhere’ if ever I saw one.”
She sighed and scratched her head. My brain needed a minute to catch up. But too soon Aleta started again.
“My Andrew and Steven details is all sketchy. For the real deal, talk to Remy--who, by the way, was relieved Andrew was not attempting suicide, just tripping real bad, staying in bed all day, not
answering the phone, because shithead Steven had left him.” Aleta rolled her eyes. “Like none of us never saw that coming. Anyway, Remy finally shook some sense into the boy. Or, knowing Remy, nonsense, because now, from what I hear, Andrew’s flown that coop a his. Again, details sketchy, but whatever that happened was enough for him to orphan poor Duke. Which reminds me. Duke!” she yelled suddenly. “Get in here!”
I turned to see the front door nudge open and that funny looking dog amble back in. My brother’s dog.
“Door!” Aleta bellowed, and I flinched again. Duke’s ears pricked up. He turned, lowered his face, and head-butted the door closed. “I taught him that,” Aleta said proudly. “Now if I could only get him to work a deadbolt, I’d be in business. Anyway. You going to press that damn knob or not?”
Before she could yell again, I did as told--a habit I’d have to learn to break one day soon. Then Aleta took over, filling our glass mugs with coffee, topping them with frothed milk. She scooted a sugar bowl towards me, and I spooned some in. Duke came over and gave me another sniff test, and I looked him over more closely as I waited for my coffee to cool. He was smaller than the dogs we had growing up, black and white and toffee colored, one eye blue, one eye brown, with a muzzle full of fuzzy whiskers that hinted of a little terrier blood in him. I bent down to scratch his wiry ears while I tried to make sense of all the information Aleta had just told me. I wondered what I should do next to figure things out or whether my trip here had simply been a lost cause. Duke must have sensed my anxiety. He pounced up and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I squeezed the paw he had laid on my knee and decided I liked him.
I looked up to find Aleta squeezing honey into her coffee from a small plastic bear.
“Weird, I know,” she said when she caught me staring. “But that’s me!” She smiled and took a sip. I looked at the plastic bear she had just set down.
Honey.
I hated the smell and the taste of it. It made me think of that summer my father and Lew Pingley tried to domesticate the hive of bees Andrew found in the woods, the summer I got stung thirty-two times and almost died. The summer Daddy left and Elizabeth was born.
“You all right?” Aleta asked me. She took a dog biscuit from the pocket of her robe and gave it to Duke, who sank to the floor, munching greedily.
I nodded, scooted the honey bear away from me and took a drink of my coffee. In no particular order, Aleta rattled on a few more details about my brother’s life in this city, how he had dropped out of school just a semester shy of getting an art history degree, how he had nearly gotten arrested at a political protest not so long ago, how he had landed his plum job in the membership department of the Philadelphia Museum thanks to the thrift store suit she had helped him pick out. Had there been more coffee and no clock on the microwave, I got the sense Aleta might have gone on for hours. But as the blue digits ticked toward ten o’clock, Aleta stretched her arms and announced she had to get ready for work.
“You wanna see Andrew’s old room before you go?”
I was tired and wanted to find someplace to lay down my head for a while. But finding a hotel and a cool shower would have to wait. Aleta sensed how important my brother’s trail had become to me, and she was being kind.
Aleta gave the dog his breakfast and led me upstairs, past bedroom doors plastered with
silkscreened posters advertising rock bands I’d never heard of and burlesque reviews by a troupe called the L’il Dump Theatre. Behind one bedroom door a radio was playing, strands of jazz mixing with the
occupant’s steady snore. Aleta laid a finger to her lips as we passed and whispered, “Tommy.” When we reached the top floor, Aleta pointed to the door across from her bedroom. It was painted with the same curlicue comets and shooting stars as the red door outside. “That was Andrew’s. Take a look. Don’t mind the boxes. Me, I gotta get ready for work.” Aleta disappeared into the bathroom.
As I opened the bedroom door, the room drew a breath as dirty window shades flapped against their screens. Muffled jazz made its way up from the bedroom below. Piles of boxes and bags filled the room, reminding me of our front porch at home on yard sale days. I stepped in. Near one window, a
mattress lay on the floor, and I wondered if rain had blown in on it. The whole room had the musty smell of old newspapers, and I fought a reflexive urge to start cleaning up. Andrew’s name was written in black magic marker on a box of books and papers that sat atop the mattress, so I began to look through it: paperback novels with post cards and old letters mixed in, a few notebooks, an old journal. I cleared a place on the mattress and sat down, hoping to find some clue in the box as to where he went and why. The wind flapped the window shades again, and a glitter of light caught my eye. I looked up.
On the wall across from the bed, Andrew had taped an enormous map of the world, which he had decorated with paint and magic markers. He had drawn a cluster of blue dots on places in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, a few more in Virginia, New York and the Jersey coast. The places he’d been, I
supposed, and from across the room all those dark dots on the wall-sized map amounted to no more than a mouse’s nibble. Certainly no sizeable bite out of the world. But spiraling out from that hub were dotted trails in shiny gold marker, pointing to places like California, the Florida Keys, the Gulf of Mexico. The trails branched out over the Pacific and Atlantic, touching down in Hawaii, Australia, Easter Island. They
of. Hovering above these dreamed-of journeys was a symbol I’d come to recognize, a simplified outline of a winged figure whose fat little head sported apple seed eyes and two tiny nostrils, my brother Andrew’s trademark angelic alien. I studied the map a long time. All the places my brother wanted to go, a map to everywhere. And here I was, stuck in Philadelphia with only the shirt on my back and the money in my purse.
After a while I became aware that the shower water had shut off and Aleta had begun moving around in her room. I threw a few things from Andrew’s box into a plastic bag I found and crept back through the room’s junk to the hall.
Aleta’s door was wide open, and she stood there in her sunny back bedroom with only a towel draped around her waist, putting on deodorant. I averted my eyes.
“Everythin’ all ‘ight?” she asked.
“Do you mind if I take this?” I said holding up the bag.
“You’d be doin’ me a favor if you took his dog and everything else in that whole damn room.” I told her I thought the letters and notebooks were enough for know. Maybe they would help me find Andrew.
“Maybe,” she said, finally putting on an army green tank top. “But you’d be better off talking to Remy.” As she finished dressing, she gave me directions to the nearby bookstore where he worked. “Just don’t get lost in the Amble-Through,” she warned at the end. I thanked her. As I started down the stairs, she called after me. “Pull that front door shut so you don’t let any crackheads in.”
Outside, I could hear an old song, “Lover Man”, coming from the second floor window. The raspy, languid plea was unmistakably Billie Holiday, not Diana Ross, though the song and the sight of Aleta made me think back to the summer I had seen Lady Sings the Blues three times, the summer I had wanted more than anything to be black. Imagine, a shy white girl from West Virginia, plunking down six quarters for that vintage matinee.
My grandmother was the one who gave me the money for those shows. She would hand me coins from one of the many pockets in the colorful apron she’d come to wear ever since the summer before, when Momma had her play the Pick-a-Pocket lady at a church fundraiser. Momma’s energy had been high back then, her mood wild and happy. She might feed Andrew and me banana splits for breakfast, lunch and dinner, or drag out board games—Payday, Sorry, Life—and play with us all night long while Daddy was away, pinching our toes when we grew too sleepy to grab the dice as soon as it was our turn. We went to church every Sunday back then, where Momma sang so loud people rows ahead would turn to look at her. When Reverend Helmsley asked for someone to organize the annual spaghetti dinner, it was Momma who jumped to her feet. No one else offered to work with her, but she didn’t care; she would man the kitchen herself and make her family work the floor. And so, while Andrew read the little kids stories and Grandma Rose let them pull plastic prizes from her apron pockets, I took iced tea to their parents and apologized that
their food wasn’t ready. In the kitchen, Momma, never the best cook, had burned the meatballs and scorched the bread. I returned to get refills just in time to see her drop a pot of bubbling sauce all over herself. Everyone in the church basement must have heard her scream. Faster than I could take Momma ice in a towel, Grandma Rose was there in the funny apron Momma had sewn, making sure her daughter was okay then inspecting the kitchen. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and told me to fetch