What We've Lost Is Nothing (18 page)

“I'll . . . try and pull something out of that,” Summer said, trotting away from him the minute he stopped for a breath. He barely noticed her leaving. He was suddenly aware of tears, rolling down his cheeks, a sensation he couldn't ever remember having as an adult. This, he realized, was what it felt like to
feel
. He turned, making no move to wipe his face, no attempt to calm his ragged breath, and there was Alicia, staring at him. His wife. The woman he wasn't sure had
ever
compelled him to feel in the way that this moment had, full of something. Full of anything at all. Alicia Dixon
cum
Kowalski. Ponytail, wisps around her face. Tanned. On the thin side. Light brown eyes like clay. Standing now, arms wrapped around herself. Watching her husband quietly cry, and she did the same right alongside him.

Neither of them noticed Michael McPherson come in the revolving door at the back entrance to Village Hall, followed by Arthur Gardenia, Helen Pappalardo, and Paja Coen, as Étienne Lenoir walked out.

Wordpress Blog
, April 7, 2004, http://resmgr.wordpress
.com/
2004
/
04
/07/truth-of-diversity-hurts:

The Truth of Diversity Hurts

By Lola LOL, Anon., Residence Manager just west
of Austin

Well, I don't know how to tell you this, Oak Park, but the truth hurts. Maybe Shakespeare could put this better than me—in fact, I'm sure he could—so rather than try, I'll just give you a few spoonfuls of my building's statistics:

➢
Demographic breakdown of building:

• 32 units. 1 Pan-Asian. 5 African-American. 26 Caucasian.

➢
Noise complaints in past month: 3

• 1st offender, treadmill on 3rd floor (Black. Woman. Single.)

• 2nd offender, dance instructor holding class in living room on 2nd floor (White. Man. Single.)

• 3rd offender, born-again Christian speaking in tongues on 1st floor (Black. Woman. Single.)

➢
Police called by resident manager in past three months: 2

• 1st offender, crack addiction—taken from residence to psychiatric unit in restraints (Black. Girl. Teenager.)

• 2nd offender, dealing drugs—taken from residence to juvenile detention center in handcuffs (Black. Boy. Teenager.)

➢
Late rent in past three months: 2

• 1st offender/repeat offender. Still living in unit (Black. Woman. Single.)

• 2nd offender/repeat offender. Evicted (White. Woman. Single.)

➢
Fire in past four years: 1

• Offender, postcoital cigarette on mattress in laundry room (Black. Boy. Teenager with unidentified girl.)

➢
Failure to take garbage from back deck to alley Dumpster in past month: too many to count

• Offenders—black, white, woman, man, single, married, teenager.

➢
Demographic breakdown at last resident manager Sunday brunch:

• Of 32 units, 7 attended: 6 white, 1 black.

➢
Demographic breakdown of tenants who attended last week's monthly building-wide walk:

• 4. White.

• Number of rehabbed apartments: 28

• Number of units not rehabbed: 4

• Number of blacks living in units not rehabbed: 4

• Number of whites living in rehabbed units: 26

• Number of “other” living in rehabbed units: 1

• Number of complaints from tenants in non-rehabbed units to get units rehabbed: 3

I've been a resident manager in a building for four years now, going on five. You all know this. I write about it all the time! The rodents, the cockroaches, the parties, the gardening, the mopping and the sweeping and the apartment showing, and the moving in and moving out, and the lockouts, and the heat, and the air-conditioning, and the parking and all the follies and foibles of living in and managing a multi-unit residential building in this wonderful community we all call home. You've read about them all.

But I don't tell you about the real stuff. The hard stuff. The truth.

Diversity Assurance. Yes. I'm part of it. A BIG part of it. And I have to say that from a philosophical standpoint I am a believer in it—but a believer with one sweeping caveat:

Because we don't have something better.

Is my building diverse? Yes, indeed, it sure is, Dear Reader. I've convinced whites and whites and more whites that this is a safe and lovely community to make one's home in—and I believe that. Five years ago, I was the third white tenant to move in. The demographics have shifted that much that quickly.

But what happens when one of the four black tenants who've all lived here more than fifteen years comes to my apartment with a complaint? Or for one of my quarterly Sunday brunches (to create community)?

Well, they see the truth. They see the beautiful hardwood floors I have, the new paint job, the newly outfitted kitchen. They see the rehabbed apartments that their landlord creates in part from their rent and in part from this village's grants program. And what do they think? Do they understand that in order to have a rehabbed apartment, they'd actually have to vacate for a month or two? No, they don't know that until they're told. And then, say they're willing . . . do they understand that their rent would increase by fifty, sixty, seventy percent? No. They don't get gentrification, which is really what D.A. is most of the time. This, Readers, is what they get:

Who's living in those nice rehabbed apartments?

. . . Everyone but them.

We have one rehabbed apartment with an African-­American—a resident at a nearby hospital who is friendly to me, but not “friends” with me, and who appears to work 20 hours a day. This makes me sad. Just one. But I'm told I'm doing a good job; I'm told my building ­demographics mirror the country at large and that is the point. But the demographics don't take into account the staggering ­difference between standards of living of those in rehabbed units ­versus those not (who, admittedly, pay far less in rent).

I'm not saying it's not complicated, and I'm not saying we should kill D.A. But I am saying that if the Village of Oak Park thinks there's community here—real community, where we rely on each other, where we have each other's backs—then they're probably living in a dreamscape.

I don't know the answer. I don't believe we've found it—in D.A. or anywhere. I know what happened on Ilios Lane isn't something that should be pinned on the residents of the west side—even if it was residents from the west side who did it—and I know Oak Park isn't nearly the racial panacea that it believes itself to be—and that exists on both sides, blacks and whites. Because the blacks who live in my building and see my rehabbed apartment and curse at me when I call them to take out their garbage? They don't want to hang with me any more than I want to hang with them. They don't rely on me any more than I rely on them. Call this racist. Call it honest. Call it a factor of economics and culture and age, too. Call it all these things, because it probably is.

I wish it were different. I wish they were different. I wish I were different. I try. I truthfully, even in my darkest moments, believe I am trying. But mostly, I wish we were honest enough to come up with something better for ourselves, for all of us than, well, than our own devilish human nature.

Peace out, Readers.

~Lola “LOL”

3:38 p.m.

S
usan McPherson was having trouble breathing. Her face was wet and her eyes were nearly blinded by tears and she was insanely thirsty. The boys were still following her. Why hadn't she told them off? Why hadn't she shouted,
What the hell do you think you're doing? You think you're funny? Go home to your mothers.

Why hadn't she done what would have come so naturally in another place, with other boys? Other—she could not quite bring her mind to form the word—
white
boys, other
white
neighborhoods, where she was aware of the power brought by age. Here is the single thought that formed, as she ran, as she heard their laughter and hooting at the tears she could not contain:
Who am I kidding?

All those years believing that proximity meant something, that her home just three blocks
from
the west side in any way at all resembled the west side. She'd driven through here. So many times she'd avoided the Eisenhower Expressway on the west and driven into the city down Chicago Avenue, down Lake Street, down Madison or Washington, and never once did she lock her car doors because she believed herself
aligned with these people. She thought her life had been devoted to living among them, when, it was so terrifyingly clear to her now, she'd never even walked among them.

How could she have missed this?

The boys will get tired of her. The boys will get bored. If she yelled at them now, it would only highlight her weakness, her fear. The boys will slowly fall away like wolves, she thought. One after another. Just one. Just
one
needed to leave.

Imagine yourself running past the manicured lawns and mansions of Kenilworth, past the bank and then the Lake Theatre and all the way east past the library, she told herself. She wasn't far. She'd run here, after all, carried by her own two legs. That was the beauty of the grid system that was Chicago. She simply had to go west. But cul-de-sacs. Those could surprise you, and if she ended up turning down a cul-de-sac with an apartment building at the end and an alleyway the only escape, she'd be in real trouble. Stop your fucking crying, she told herself.

She ran past crumbling brownstones, large brick apartment buildings with busted windows and broken bottles sprinkled across the entryways. There were dirt lawns, no flowers, no children on the sidewalks pushing themselves on wobbly scooters. Through a few windows she could make out the flashes of television sets as she passed, she could hear the bass thumping of rap and hip-hop. She tripped in a pothole, landed hard on her foot, righted herself. The boys shook with laughter. She ran past an abandoned brick building with multicolored asphalt shingles. She slipped on a flattened paper sack from McDonald's, righted herself. Chain-link fences waist high ran along the sidewalk in front of nearly every house. But she heard no human sounds, save for the boys following her, collapsing with laughter. She could feel her leg muscles starting to vibrate from the effort, feel her lungs straining with each breath. Such thirst she had!
How much longer can I run?
She had to extricate herself. Go west. Surely Michael would be worried. Mary Elizabeth would be home from school. Was she closer to Oak Park in the west, or the Loop to the east? Garfield Park. There was a botanical garden there. If she could just get there, someone would let her use the phone. Let her sit down. Offer her some water.

How can I be lost in a grid?
she thought.
How can I be lost so close to home?

3:48 p.m.

É
tienne saw Michael McPherson entering through the revolving door at the police station as he was exiting, and he offered a tentative smile.

“Where were you?” Michael's body was rigid, the tails of his beige trench coat flapping in the breeze. “Yesterday afternoon, where the hell were you?”

“Mr. McPherson,” Helen Pappalardo said. But then she had nothing to follow it up with.

Étienne didn't answer.

“Get back from Paris early, then? Get the Concorde, maybe?”

“What's going on?” Arthur whispered to anyone in earshot. He wore his dark glasses, and an aging Members Only jacket in burgundy, thinning at the wrists, his gray hair fluttering in the soft wind.

“I saw you last night, Lenoir. Talking to Wasserman on your front porch, and I know you saw me. So I'm asking you,
neighbor
, where the hell were you?” Michael's index finger, straight as chalk, poked Étienne's chest.

Étienne was unused to confrontation. To be the object of anything was a revelation to him, that he could be the source of fervent emotion, of ire, fury, frustration.

“Yes,” he told Michael McPherson, “I lied about Paris. I lied. I lied.”

“Hey! You hear that news flash? You hear that, everyone? He
lied. . . .
My question isn't whether you lied, Lenoir, it's why? Where
were
you yesterday?”

Paja Coen, another Ilios Lane resident, walked around Helen, to stand next to Michael. Aldrin Rutherford had brought his estranged wife and children to the police station early that morning, and he was, at that moment, screwing in two kitchen cabinet doors that had been ripped off their hinges at the home he'd shared, until a month earlier, with his wife and children.

“Good lord, Michael. What does it matter?” Arthur said.

“Let him go,” Paja Coen said. She had no idea what it was about Étienne Lenoir that seemed to incite Michael McPherson.

“No, it's fine . . . ” Étienne wanted to say it was fine Ms. ____, but he didn't know her name. “Yes.” Étienne turned to Michael. “Yes, I was at my restaurant yesterday. I lied about Paris. But I had nothing,
nothing whatsoever
, to do with the burglaries.”

Michael McPherson's face was red, his fists were balled. Hoodlums were parked two doors down from his house. Cambodian hoodlums and their not-as-innocent-as-she-appears cousin. There was his wife, out there running a fucking marathon or whatever just to drive him crazy; there was his daughter skipping school and storming away from him as if
he
had been breaking the rules. There was his house, his street, his life, invaded right under his nose. There was everything, right there, before him in the eyes of Étienne Lenoir, his lying neighbor. Helen put her hand on Michael's shoulder. A police cruiser pulled up, parked in an open spot at the front reserved for officers on duty. A thick-waisted man with a shaved head and deep wrinkles around his eyes slid out from behind the driver's seat, holding a balled-up sack from Wendy's. He walked to the entrance where the five neighbors were gathered. The officer nodded, glanced at the five of them one at a time so quickly you'd never notice unless you were the noticing type. Slowly, because he sensed tension and was aware of his presence as a diffuser, he sauntered to the revolving door, stood in one of its quarters for a short but determined second, said “Afternoon” to them, and then began to push the door around.

Michael's body slackened. Helen took her hand off him.

There was so much more Étienne wanted to say to Michael. So much more explaining he wanted to do. About how he believed trips to Paris would lend credibility to his kitchen. About how it seemed like a place where he'd become someone other than whom he knew himself to be. About how it was always Paris he believed would bring on his mattering, and now he saw it was the illusion of Paris, it was the un-Parising of Paris. He mattered not because of something he'd done, but because of something he hadn't done. He mattered only as a measure of abstraction.