I exhaled two steady streams of smoke through my nostrils. “Believe me, I’d get on a plane back to London in a heartbeat if I could.” Things had taken a turn for the worse in London, but . . . anything was better than this.
As I watched my brothers, I wondered how they would cope. Bobby gazed out the car window at the freshly falling snow, his expression one of resignation. Whitney sat smoking in the backseat, his face stamped with bitterness. Wondering where I would go, what I would do, I suddenly felt the deepest fatigue, the kind no amount of sleep might relieve.
Night had fallen. Still, we did not get out of the parked car. Soft clumps of snow floated down into the beams of the street lamps behind us, and every house on the street, with the exception of ours, shimmered with festive lights. I could hear the faint sound of singing and turned to see a neighbor’s front door open and a group of carolers standing inside their warmly lit atrium. Hark! The herald angels sing / glory to the newborn king! They sang joyously to the crowd gathered around them, in the cold, cold night.
The sugary smell of Campbell’s tomato soup filled the house as we went in at last. Bobby and Whitney went into the kitchen, and I retreated upstairs, feeling a headache coming on. My room still felt unfamiliar despite all the years of visiting my mother at this house, my old bookshelves, dresser, and desk arranged gracelessly against the polka-dotted walls, probably by the movers themselves when she first arrived here, never to be revisited.
I could hear Bobby’s and Whitney’s voices down in the kitchen, filling my mother and grandmother in on the meeting with Bill. I couldn’t hear the words, but compared with the rise and fall of my brothers’ distress my mother’s voice was a low murmur.
I went into the bathroom, took two Advil, and looked in the mirror: there were swollen sacks beneath my eyes; my skin was pale with winter, translucent almost. My grandmother was right: my hair looked like hell—bleached and cut too short, a supercropped bob that succeeded only in rendering me utterly androgynous. I had even taken to slicking it back in the style of a man. The cut and color had looked chic in my mirror in England, but here, in my mirror back home, I could see only that I’d thrown away my looks, and two years of my life, to chase down a dream that now seemed as elusive as Santa Claus. An American woman, the next British art star? I laughed bitterly. Wanting to scream for all the wasted time, the squandered energy, the crazy hubris that had kept that dream alive, I grabbed my cheap hair and pulled until the tears came.
Homecoming
CRETE, 1997
(by Frances Stroh)
Detroit, 2000
I know my brothers will like you,” I assured my boyfriend. “They’ll like that you’re Russian, first of all, and they’ll definitely appreciate your cooking.”
We sped past Detroit, headed to Grosse Pointe on the Chrysler Freeway. We’d come from San Francisco, where we were living together. It was nearly our three-year anniversary, in fact. My family was gathering for an annual business meeting and, though Arkady had already met my parents on several occasions, I was taking the opportunity to introduce him to my brothers. Even Charlie would be there.
“I’ll cook them a great dinner,” said Arkady in his thick Russian accent.
Detroit had always looked bombed out, but now it seemed positively abandoned, with whole blocks of what appeared to be unoccupied houses. I knew many of the city’s inhabitants had fled as late-stage industrialization set in, but I’d had no idea just how bad things had become. This was the legacy of Coleman Young’s twenty years in office. Young was a mayor who’d gloated as white businesses moved out, no matter how many black jobs were lost in the process. The desolation was the aftermath of shortsighted union leaders who had tailored their policies to bolster the faltering automotive industry and line their own pockets. And the consequence of the Big Three automakers themselves, who for too long had refused to build smaller, cheaper, more fuel-efficient cars to compete with their foreign counterparts.
Now, with the retreat of the automotive industry to the suburbs and abroad, all signs of manufacturing had finally vanished in Detroit, its smokestacks emitting no smoke. In many parts of the city, only footprints of manufacturing plants remained where the buildings themselves had been leveled. Defunct cement silos dotted the riverfront because the city was too broke to take them down. Crack cocaine, the cornerstone of the new economy, was a difficult commodity to tax.