Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

She began to stop by the store on random afternoons to pick up a carton of milk or a piece of candy for her daughter, and we would chat briefly about the weather, the neighborhood, children.

“Do you have any?” she asked me once.

“None that I’ll acknowledge. But I’m working on it.”

“Too bad. It’s easier if you know them.”

“I’ll try and remember that next time.”

We waved to each other from across the circle and extended our conversations with each other whenever our paths crossed coming in or out of our houses. I wasn’t the only one in the neighborhood to notice her. Of all the white people who had moved into Logan Circle over the past six months, she was the most visible, and not just because she spent her afternoons reading in the circle, or because she occasionally shopped in my store. It was Naomi, with her lighter than black but darker than white skin, sitting next to her on a bench, or walking with her hand in hand, who made people notice.

Mrs. Davis, who lived alone one floor below me, was the first to say something. It was the beginning of November and Judith had fully settled into her new home and become a fixture around the neighborhood. Her routine was familiar to those of us who watched. She was prone to midafternoon runs and reading in her living room with the curtains pulled back. The house looked beautiful now, especially at night with the single porch bulb shining down on the steps, which had also been smoothed out and worked over.

“You know that woman living next door?”

Mrs. Davis was standing outside as she normally did, leaning against the front fence, surveying every person and car that passed before her with what she believed was a keen and watchful eye for all things suspicious. For twenty-three years she had lived in this neighborhood, thirteen of which were spent in this house, first alone, and then with her husband, who passed away eight years ago. Over the years I had watched her go to church two, sometimes three times a week just, I believe, so she could escape the deafening silence that came with living alone in old age. In the summer she made feeble, halfhearted attempts at planting flowers in the weed-ridden patch of soil in front of the house. A geranium or tulip would bloom, only to die of neglect. In the fall and spring she stood outside and watched the children walk home from school with their arms around each other, and in the winter you could sometimes spot her wrapped in a blanket sitting on the couch nearest the front windows simply staring out vacantly onto the empty sidewalk and street, as if something only she remembered had occurred there, and now was the hour designated for remembering it. She had a habit of spitting out bits of food trapped between her teeth as she spoke to you, and in desperate moments of restlessness she was known to sweep the sidewalks and street free of litter. Anyone who didn’t know her well and saw her pushing a broom back and forth from the front of her house to the curb thought she was mad. Those of us who knew her realized she was not mad, only bored and looking for the attention of her neighbors.

When Mrs. Davis asked me about Judith, she already knew the answer. I had caught her on several occasions watching us talk from her living-room window. She couldn’t help smiling her perfect, wide smile to remind me of that.

“Yes, Mrs. Davis. I know her.”

“Why do you think a woman like that would wanna live here? Doesn’t seem right, does it?”

She had a small face with tightly bundled features, her eyes and nose closely set together, as if they had failed to grow since she was a child. When she asked me questions she rapped her fingers against the fence, showing off her hands, which had aged even better than the rest of her.

“It’s a free country, Mrs. Davis. People can live where they like.”

“What do you know about free countries? You didn’t even know what that was till you came here last week, and now you’re telling me people can live where they like. This isn’t like living in a hut, you know. People around here can’t just put their houses on their backs and move on.”

She tried not to laugh at her own joke, but failed, and her face disappeared once more under a row of shining, perfect white teeth.

“What can you do? The neighborhood’s changing,” I told her. I had said the same thing at least a dozen times before, when the first few houses in the neighborhood were sold, when a restaurant opened up a few blocks away, when up the street the discount grocery store with two rows dedicated solely to generic goods shut down. The neighborhood’s changing, things are changing, it’s not like it used to be, I can’t believe how much it’s changed, who would have thought it could change so quickly, nothing is permanent, everything changes; the passive and helpless observations of people stuck living on the sidelines.

The change wasn’t gradual, or rapid, but somewhere in between. Two years ago I would spot the occasional odd face walking past my storefront windows — a white woman carrying groceries home early in the evening, a man jogging with his dog shortly after dusk — and think little of it. It wasn’t until the summer before Judith moved into the neighborhood that the change began in earnest, which is to say it became inevitable. Moving vans began to arrive on some of the blocks on the first of every month — the long, full-length professional ones that came fully loaded with overweight men wearing shirts barely large enough to stretch over their swollen guts. I spent most of one Sunday afternoon in July watching them move furniture into a house just outside the circle, less than a hundred feet away from my store. They unloaded two gilded mirrors and an antique desk, along with a pair of sofas with pillows so large and comfortable that I imagined myself asking if I could sit, for just a few minutes. A handful of other people were watching with me from the other side of the street. The entire time we stood out there I heard only one person say anything at all, nothing more than a simple phrase, “white people.”

“You spend all day in that store by yourself and that’s all you got to say,” Mrs. Davis said.

“Unfortunately, yes. Can I get you anything tomorrow?”

“Get me some milk. I don’t want nothing that’s expired, though. I may be old but that doesn’t mean I want my milk to be.”

“Of course not, Mrs. Davis.”

She stepped to the side and let me pass through the gate, kissing me once on the cheek as I went by.

A few days later, Naomi came into the store by herself. It was the first time I had seen her without her mother. On the few occasions Judith had brought her to the store, Naomi had simply stood quietly next to the door, hands clasped behind her back as she surveyed the contents of the aisle in front of her. I had asked her once if she wanted to come inside and take a look around. Her response had been swift and definitive.

“I can see everything from here,” she said. It was an honest answer that I couldn’t argue with.

When Naomi came into the store on her own, she became what almost all children want to be: stubbornly independent. She pushed the door open with both hands, her feet running in place behind her until it gradually began to give. Once inside, she took a swipe at a piece of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes, and as she stood there in light gray slacks and a frilly button-down blue shirt, it was possible to see for a second at least one of the women I imagine she’s going to become.

She walked through the store as if she knew where everything was already. Up one aisle and then down the other, until she had plodded her way through them all, without so much as glancing at any of the items on the shelves. When she came down the last aisle, she did so with her gaze firmly fixed on the floor, her feet clomping heavily with each step as if she were determined to crush the tile beneath her. She walked right past the counter and straight to the door, which she again struggled with in the same determined manner for a few seconds, and then she was gone. Had she not left a trail of muddy footprints down the aisle, I might not have believed she had ever been there, so quickly and resolutely did she pass through.