Ann Graham

You lug a bag of groceries and a steamy sack holding a hamburger, mustard only, fries, and probably some paper napkins. The lot is full, so you have to park on the overflow gravel and are immediately outraged when your ankle buckles on the rocky surface. Cursing out loud that at fifty-eight you shouldn’t have to walk miles in athletic shoes to get to your apartment. You compose the complaint letter in your mind. You’re paying for an apartment and a parking space, not something in the outfield.

You live in an small complex that touts its security system and on-site management. However, some annoyances are beyond their purview. Barraged daily with your elderly neighbor Crystalyn’s raspy caw, “Your people are not so innocent, missy. Lecture your own self.” There’s no reasoning with her and you’ve become cranky, agitated, and confused instead of the pensive and considerate person you thought yourself to be.

Inconveniences irritate your sense of entitlement and that you feel entitled distresses you. Crystalyn embodies an aspect of your family’s history you’d attempted to, in the beginning of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, deny. You haven’t slept well. Dire pleading and the anguished cries of history fill your apartment. They are and were real.

Careful not to bang the eggs against a car, you worry the ice cream is melting, chocolate without chips that stick in your teeth. Shouldn’t have stopped at the fast-food drive-through, but you don’t have time to cook because you have a stack of property claims due. You examined the easiest ones yesterday so now you must complete the complicated ones.

There’s no avoiding Crystalyn predictably occupying the bench outside your building’s entrance. Today her rant is about a new tenant. When you ignore her, she yells louder, “Those people in 3B are Chinese.”

You know they’re Thai.

“Who moved out last night?” she bellows, “Looters, peaceful protesters, ha, ha, sneaking out in the dark like cockroaches.”

You’ve heard her harangues about everything and any pinprick at all. Once, while helping her carry packages to her apartment, Crystalyn showed you an abhorrent portrait of a Civil War brigadier general, an ancestor of hers, hung above the fireplace. As an insurance adjuster, you’ve seen many repugnant possessions and recently began analyzing your family heirlooms. She yapped about not erasing history, wildly enthusiastic about saving Confederate soldier statues, most of them hastily erected by Daughters of the Confederacy in the nineteen-sixties and often mass-produced and of questionable artistic merit.

First thing, when you enter your third-floor apartment, you throw the ice cream into the freezer, pour yourself a lemonade, and arrange the burger and fries on your prized majolica plate inherited from great, great aunt, Eunice. You retrieve a crisp linen napkin, one that’s untouched, from your antique sugar safe, a family heirloom. The cherrywood sugar safe with its fine dovetailing and original brass handles has a long but superficial crack across the lid, otherwise the golden finish is in untouched condition and you believe it to be a valuable piece of Southern furniture. As you admire it, you hear the voices again, at first soft, then loud, louder. A youngster wails, “Mama, Mama.” You throw open the lid. A whimper grows into a chorus. You slam the top. Your nerves are shot. You need sleep. You haven’t been this confused since the sixties with the riots, war, and curfews. Only seven when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, you eavesdropped on adults hoping to make sense of the senseless. Pictures flew across the television screen and you feared your life was going to become unpredictable and dangerous.

You drop the empty sack and soggy hamburger wrapper into the wastebasket. You wipe your sweaty palms on your napkin. Even the daisies on your dining table are weary, you trim the ends and refresh the water. As you replace the vase on your grandmother’s hand-tatted doily, you look out the window and see that Crystalyn’s blasting a diatribe at another neighbor. You want to run back outside and shake her until her neck snaps and her head flops. Instead, you take a long slug of lemonade, wipe your lips, and grab a French fry. Your apartment will hold onto the mustardy aroma all afternoon; you throw the fry onto the plate instead of eating it.

You consider the sugar safe along with the notion that you’re not as good as you’ve always assumed. Surely, a public statue is worse than a privately owned piece of furniture, even if it stored valuable sugar, an industry that operated with enslaved children toting, from morning to night, giant canes from the fields to the conveyors. You run a finger across the keyhole that had protected the commodity that made the Havemeyers and other whites disgustingly rich. Your ears buzz; you hear fingernails claw, thrashing cracks, and guttural groans coming from the sugar cabinet.

The deflated hamburger bun has become wrinkled, you poke it and shove it aside. Stomach acid rises into your throat. Incidents in which you’d been hurtful and clueless flood your thoughts. They’d been scared you’d call the cops because you frightened yourself with your own imagination. You’re embarrassed and ashamed. You’re not racist, are you? Crystalyn roars, “You’re not as good as you think. You’re not as pure as you think.” You slap your ears. It won’t stop.

You tug and drag, scratching the floor, the priceless antique out onto your balcony. Electrified, you raise the lid to let loose the children’s sobbing, begging for their mothers. You slap your ears. Fury gives you strength to inch the sugar safe up the railing and when it’s at the top, you lean hard into it and push it over the side. You watch it crash and splinter.