Chapter 12. The Front Hall
Back to Rainwood House Sings!
Greetings Comrades/Colleagues/Neighbors/Relations/Friends (CCNRFs)!
I got quite ill in the last days of 2024 and first couple weeks of 2025, and so had to forgo publishing my end-of-month essay and a couple of serialized novel installments. Better now and back to our story…
Quick recap: Despite mixed feelings, Marlie has decided to let Demetrius spend the night on the kitchen couch, since it has gotten late while she and Samantha have been talking with him about renting a room, and many other things besides. Of course, they do not know that this is not the first but the second night he has spent at Rainwood House…
Marlie gropes under her pillow to stifle her little alarm clock. Still half asleep, she turns toward the tempting warmth of Samantha’s body nestled against hers. How long since she shared a bed with anyone? She begins counting back the years, then stops. Don’t drift, she commands herself. She opens her eyes in the pitch-dark room and looks at the clock. 5:05, past time to get up and go.
But she can’t.
Every workday, Marlie flings herself out of bed, hits the bathroom, throws on her uniform, makes and pours a cup of coffee, sticks a few globs of whatever is in the refrigerator into her lunch box, and grabs a bagel to eat in the car. By 5:38 she’s dropping a kiss on Samantha’s sleeping face, dashing out Rainwood House’s creaky front gate, crossing fingers that her car’s systems are operational, speeding north on Route One to College Park, careening into her ridiculously expensive assigned space on the Campus Grounds Department lot, and clocking in just before she is officially late at 6:05.
Meanwhile, Samantha’s doggy clock barks the girl awake at 7:00. The girl eventually drags herself out of bed (nearer 7:30, Marlie suspects), gives herself some sort of washing, puts on an assortment of garments, subjects her hair to a variety of attentions, eats whatever she can find, stuffs her homework and who knows what else in her backpack, and runs the three blocks to school, sliding in just at, or just after, the 8:15 late bell. That’s the way they’ve done it for a year, before which Marlie paid a neighbor teen a pretty sum to sleepwalk a block to Rainwood House at 5:30 A.M., doze on the kitchen couch until time to wake Samantha, get her ready, and deposit her at school by 8:00 to eat the free breakfast.
When Samantha entered fourth grade, Marlie felt she was old enough to get ready on her own. The annoying truancy computer still calls at about the same rate, once or twice a month, to announce that “your son or daughter, Samiam Mandible, was tardy today.” Marlie feels this is as good as can be expected, even if she were home to personally shoo Samantha out the door.
But today this routine would leave Samantha alone in the house with a stranger for two hours. Marlie gazes at the girl’s tumbled hair, what she can see of it in the faint glow of her clock. No matter how nice and progressive Cole Benson might be, she can’t leave Samantha alone with him. Even if it were a strange woman, she wouldn’t do it. And the fact that he’s a Black man doesn’t help.
This last thought has crept up and pounced on her. She examines it with disgust, like a roach in her bed. Not her own thinking, she decides; it’s an alien colonizing message White supremacy has installed in her mind.
Yet the reality is inescapable. She can’t leave Samantha by herself with someone she doesn’t know. Nor can she wake Cole up and kick him out at this hour.
She’ll have to call in late. She’ll tell them her granddaughter has… a cold, a doctor’s appointment… no, a stomachache. Then, around 7:30 she can call again and say Samantha now seems better, so she’s sending her to school after all, and then Marlie can go in to work. Nobody could object to that.
Demetrius lifts his head from his rolled-up jacket, feeling hung-over. His confused senses take a full minute to recognize the Rainwood House kitchen, with its rustling plants, quivering ribbons, and garish ceramic animals.
Plus Marlie, moving silently, or trying to, between the ancient stove and refrigerator.
He sneezes.
Marlie halts, gives a sheepish shrug, and glides over to the counter, where she pours steaming water into a filter cone atop a coffee mug. She replaces the pot on the stove, leaving the blue flame alight under it, and makes a show of tiptoeing out of the room.
Demetrius gazes after her for a moment. Then his attention shifts to the bad-tempered ticking of Sourpuss, the complaint clock. The numbers on its blue face read 7:51.
He lays back with a suppressed groan, feeling twice as sore as yesterday even though the couch is a hundred times more comfortable than the bag of hardened cement he’d slept on the night before.
What should he do next? As usual with troublesome questions, his brain edges toward distractions, of which the mad kitchen has plenty. Carved parrots, painted fish, and appliquéd owls staring down at him from the counters and walls. A collection of plants his horticultural mind can spend hours identifying.
An enticing CD collection fills the top shelf of the orange bookcase. Above the makeshift blue desk hangs a large “Peace Calendar,” promising twelve months of politically correct illustrations to peruse.
He heaves himself off the couch, stops at the stove to lower the flame under the pot Marlie has left boiling, ducks behind the tie-dye curtain to use the bathroom, and goes down the hall to the foyer.
By the door, Marlie is attempting to smooth her granddaughter’s hair, which the child has tied with green yarn in four or five little tails around her face, the remaining hair swept behind her ears in a matted hunk. She’s wearing baggy black overalls and a thick, fuzzy, yellow-and-black striped sweater, making her look like a bumblebee. A neon pink knapsack with an insect face and two bouncy bug eyes sags down her back as if full of rocks.
Samantha grins at Demetrius over Marlie’s shoulder. “Hi, Duke Cole!”
“Morning, Samantha. If I’m a duke, you must be an empress.”
“There’s a girl in a book who’s already Empress of Everything.”
“Well, then, Duchess of…”
“Ms. Duchess, if you don’t walk out the door this minute, you’ll be late,” Marlie interrupts. She turns to Demetrius. “Good morning!”
He smiles as Marlie makes another attempt with the child’s hair, shrugs helplessly, gives her a kiss, and pushes her toward the door.
“Good morning, Marlie,” he replies. “The pot was boiling, so I turned it down.”
“Oh! Right!” With a distracted pat on her granddaughter’s head, she turns and strides down the hall toward the kitchen.
“Bye, Abue,” Samantha calls after her grandmother’s disappearing back. Then she turns back to Demetrius and asks, “Duchess of what?”
“Oh, Duchess of… Deliberation.”
“Huh?”
“That means you think carefully about things.”
Samantha thinks about this. “I guess I do.”
“So I’m Duke Cole, not King Cole?”
“Yeah, last night my Abue and I decided you weren’t a king but a duke, a democratic duke.”
He smiles. “Like Duke Ellington.”
She nods.
“I like it.” He’s gratified Samantha knows the Duke, then recalls she is supposed to hurry out the door. “So, time to get going?” he suggests.
Samantha’s face falls. “I guess so.” She reaches for the doorknob, but heaves a tremendous sigh.
Demetrius doesn’t want to make Samantha even later, but feels compelled to say, “Hey, Anther Panther, what’s wrong?”
Samantha bites her lip. “School is too hard.”
“The schoolwork is hard?”
“No, the people are hard.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear it. Find some easy people if you can.” Lame comment, he chides himself, but nothing wise comes to him.
She nods hopelessly and sighs once more. “Well, see ya later, Duke Cole.”
Giving her a bright smile, he twangs one of the bouncy eyes on her backpack. “Doiyoiyoing!”
Her giggle is perfunctory, but better than nothing.
“Samantha!” Marlie has come back into the hall.
“Bye for real, Abue!” Samantha darts out the big door. The two adults hear her race across the protesting porch boards and thump down the steps.
Marlie looks at Demetrius, shaking her head but smiling indulgently. “I’m on my way out, too,” she says. “I usually go to work early, but I was delayed this morning.”
“Oh,” he says. By his presence, he suspects.
The woman looks down at the ceramic coffee mug she is holding. “Um, I made you some coffee.”
He reaches for the cup. “Thank you!” Bringing the mug close to his face, he inhales deeply. “Ah!” he exclaims, taking a sip. “Real coffee! And ‘Fair Trade, Union Made!’” he reads the words printed on the cup. “Excellent!” Looking up at Marlie, he asks, “Did you sleep well?”
“Yes, very well. And you?”
Demetrius rubs his eyes. “I slept so well I’d like to go back and do it all over again.”
Marlie laughs. As she starts up the stairs, she feels such warmth in her being that she pauses mid-step to identify its source. The little conversation with Cole: it’s the first time in years—years!—she’s had a friendly conversation with another adult over how they’ve slept. Resuming her ascent, she feels amazed at how much the brief exchange has elevated her mood.
Demetrius watches Marlie climb the stairs reflectively. He guesses he’s the subject of her thoughts, and hopes they’re positive. His eyes fall on Samantha’s drawings covering the wall that leads back to the kitchen. Several show a girl with long hair sitting atop a large house, Rainwood House, obviously—there is the conical witch-hat roof atop the turret, there the vine-laden porch. Near these are several versions of the same girl flying, or falling, through the air, her face showing glee in some, terror in others.
He turns to examine the drawings behind him, on the triangular wall beneath the stairway. One depicts a girl being crammed into a closet by three other girls. The first girl’s mouth is open in a scream as she struggles against the door the others are pushing shut. Another picture shows a weeping girl glancing fearfully behind her as she runs toward a low, thick wall. Behind her stands a leering individual who—as far as Demetrius can tell—has just slashed a piece of cloth from the girl’s dress. A caption scrawled in uneven letters reads, “The stone wall that separates the rich and the poor.”
“Intense,” Demetrius remarks to himself. Samantha has the artist’s tendency to make series, including several pictures similar to the “stone wall” one.
Squeaks herald Marlie’s descent. He can’t help glancing up quickly, as if caught prying.
Marlie stops halfway down the stairs. “You’re thinking Samantha must be disturbed to produce drawings like these,” she says flatly.
“No, of course not,” he protests. “Although some of her pictures are a little bit… um…” He trails off and takes a sip of coffee.
“True, they are.” Marlie descends the remaining stairs and plants herself before a series of drawings of houses with faces, some with large tears dripping from their window eyes. “Samantha’s imagination is very vivid.” He hears the defensiveness in her voice. “I can see how they must look to an outsider, I mean, someone who doesn’t really know us.”
Demetrius smiles thinly, recalling her offhand comment about taking her medication. He’s been so focused on not scaring them; he hasn’t considered whether they might be a threat to him. If anything happens to him in this house, no one will know. Unable to meet Marlie’s gaze, Demetrius looks down. The bottom step rounds outward to accommodate the thick newel post, creating a little nook. There sit Samantha’s puppy slippers looking up at him.
He raises his eyes to find Marlie regarding him levelly. “Mr. Benson, if you require a hundred percent normal household, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
Demetrius ponders her words. If this were a “hundred percent normal household” he would never have gotten in the door, either the basement or the front. And he certainly wouldn’t have been invited to stay the night. “Anybody who can be ‘normal’ in this crazy society must be insane,” he declares stoutly.
“Exactly!” Marlie appears delighted by this answer. “And in denial! I mean, if you really look at what’s going on in society, you can’t help going crazy.”
“Too true.” Of course, there are different brands of crazy, he thinks, but does not say.
“Who knows how Samantha experiences the world?” Marlie contemplates the pictures with a dreamy expression. “But drawing seems to keep her in balance.”
He says, “She’s a smart little person, and obviously talented. If everybody got the weirdness out of their system by just drawing weird stuff, we’d all be in better shape.”
Marlie nods soberly.
Demetrius pushes aside his doubt. Marlie and Samantha feel okay to him; odd, maybe, but not dangerous. He surveys the drawings again and points to one. “This sketch of books flying around like bats reminds me I want to find a library.” He would prefer to hole up in the house, but she hasn’t yet accepted him. He’ll have to suggest Marlie call his grandmother in the afternoon, saying she’s out selling her needlework—which could be true—so he has to time alert her.
“There’s a library right down on Rhode Island Avenue,” she tells him. “It’s just a little one, but the librarian’s very nice.”
He would be less noticeable in a large library with indifferent librarians. “I also need to buy some things,” he adds.
“Then you’d better go to the main library, beside PG Plaza mall. I can drop you there.”
“I don’t want to make you late.”
“I’m late already.” She smiles at him. “I go right by the library. Then you can get the bus back, or walk. It’s just a couple miles. I should be home around 3:30.”
“I’ll time my return for about then.”
“Okay.” She hesitates. “If you’re still serious about the room, you can stick your bag under here.” She points to a table beside the front hall radiator.
“Oh, yes,” he answers. “I would be grateful.”
“You can wait on the porch if you get here before I do,” she adds. “It’s not too cold today.”
“Thanks.” He pauses. “Um, also, I’m looking for some computer help, if you know anyone.” What he needs is coaching in making his computer secure. He’s read about Homeland Security tracing people online and the FBI snooping into people’s emails. He has to find out what is true and what is hype. Not that he would spell this out to Marlie or a computer technician.
“I can ask my friend at the university who’s a total computer guru.”
“That would be great. You are really kind.” He tries to convey how much he means it. She has conflicted feelings; that’s obvious. But she seems to see him as a real person, in a way many people do not.
Ducking back into the kitchen for her travel mug, Marlie recalls how trusting she had been as a nineteen-year-old student in Mexico City. She recollects an acquaintance to whom she blithely lent her VW bug because she could think of no reason to say no. When he finally returned it she had been madder at him for making her feel stupid that she had trusted him than for the dent he put in the fender.
Okay, sure, not everyone is trustworthy, Marlie tells herself. But what’s the harm of giving Cole a ride or letting him sit on the porch, especially since she already let him stay last night? Nothing bad happened—except she tripped over her booby-trap of books when she got up to use the bathroom.
Marlie decides she’ll put some hummus—if it’s not spoiled—on the remaining blueberry bagels so they can have a quick breakfast in the car.
As Demetrius sticks his duffel under the hall table, he hears Marlie’s tuneful voice upstairs. In the lovely, plaintive song he distinguishes the words,“Tú que puedes, vuélvete…”
You who can, turn back. Too late for that, he thinks.