Chapter 6. Upstairs
Samantha bounds up the stairs, skimming her hand along the wooden banister, enjoying how smooth and warm it is from years and years of hands.
At the top she launches herself across the bare wood floor of the upstairs landing, sliding her feet like Kit did in the American Girl book about the Depression boarding house. Kit helped out by dusting the hallway floor in her socks, which always sounded fun to Samantha. Now she can do it, too!
One of Samantha’s socks snags on a splinter. She quickly stomps her other foot down hard to halt her forward momentum. Carefully, she pulls her foot back to disengage the splinter, which thankfully slides right out, staying attached to the floor. Blinking away a tear–it really made her heel sting—she thinks, Maybe Kit’s floors weren't as rough as those in Rainwood House.
Samantha recalls when her Abue took her to work, that time there was a teacher training day so she didn’t have school. On their way down a long hall hunting for a bathroom, Samantha saw a building cleaner in her blue uniform shirt pushing a growling machine like a giant robot badger.
A floor polisher, her Abue had explained.
“Hola, hermana!” the woman pushing the robot badger called out.
Samantha asked, “Is that your sister?”
Her Abue smiled. “My union sister.”
As she pulls her sock back on, Samantha thinks how she loves to see her Abue smile. Her high cheeks get round and her eyes light up.
But a robot badger polisher is too expensive for Rainwood House, so no shiny floors for the boarders. Community mates? Samantha can’t remember the right word. Collective boarders?
She shrugs and pats the small radiator at the far end of the upstairs landing, then wraps her hand around one of its cast iron coils. It’s barely warm, but it feels full of energy, like Rainwood House’s blood is whooshing through it.
“Collective boarders,” she repeats aloud. Her Abue cares about calling things by the right name. Samantha agrees: in books, the wrong magic words can mess things up. “Right, Drunella?” she asks her invisible friend. Samantha waits, but not impatiently. Sometimes it takes Drunella a while to appear.
Samantha does a slow twirl around the landing, lightly touching each of the doors that open onto it. First her own door, at the top of the stairs. (Twirl) Then next door, her Abue’s door with the Mexican bark drawings taped to it. (Twirl) The drawings are pretty, but they make Samantha and Drunella laugh, imagining them barking. Today this isn’t funny, because it looks like barking drawings are as close as she’ll ever come to having a dog.
This makes her sad and mad for a minute, but she twirls away from that thought to touch the door of the junk room. It is Samantha’s favorite door, because it sits in its own little caddy-cornered wall. Samantha thinks this will be the room of the new collective boarder. But it’s so full of old furniture and stuff, you can hardly open the door. It will take more than a robot badger to clear it.
She twirls to the bathroom door, opposite the stairs. Right now, Samantha is the only one using it, since her Abue’s bedroom has its own little bathroom. Samantha will share with the new collective boarder, she supposes. The boarder might have bubble bath! Samantha loves bubble bath, though almost never gets to use it, since her Abue says it makes the bathtub too slimy and hard to clean. And dangerous, she usually adds.
Samantha’s Abue sees bad things happen in her head—such as Samantha slipping on the slippery tub and crashing her head, and blood spilling out. Samantha can easily see that sort of thing, too, if she lets herself. But she always decides not to.
She pushes off the bathroom door for another twirl, thinking about her Abue’s brain, which is more like the Super Mario Speedway game, speeding along so fast she can’t keep from crashing into bad thoughts. Just this afternoon, when they went to the Happy Hog to shop and to pin up the notice about Rainwood House wanting collective boarders, her Abue suddenly screwed up her face as if she’d hurt herself. Samantha guessed she was seeing some horrible accident in her head with the new collective boarders.
When she first came to live at Rainwood House, that look on her Abue’s face had made Samantha scared. Abue explained she was just seeing a bad thing happen in her head, like a movie but super quick, not anything real. Samantha always tells her not to let her mean mind scare her, and her Abue hugs her and says she’ll try.
This time, at the Happy Hog, her Abue saw a scary mind movie that made her give a quick screech. The guy at the cash register with his locs pushed up inside his big knit hat heard it and looked over at them as they stood by the bulletin board. Her Abue was holding a thumbtack, so she shook her hand and sucked a finger as if she’d pricked it. Samantha agrees that a pricked finger is easier to understand than a scary mind movie.
Samantha twirls around to the door of the Picture Room, one of the Rainwood House rooms her Abue doesn’t go into. Samantha doesn’t either, but only because the door is so stuck she can’t open it by herself.
Last, she twirls to the Book Room door. Behind it is her favorite room in the whole house, maybe tied with the kitchen.
Samantha opens this door and steps in, sliding her feet forward slowly because she can barely see, since the windows are all covered up with cardboard.
Today Samantha doesn’t plan to stay in the book room for long, so she doesn’t bother bending down the cardboard, which lets in daylight but makes the room even colder. She’s already chilly because she and her Abue just did the Sunday plant watering ritual, which they always do after shopping at the Happy Hog. Samantha waters all the plants she can reach and sings her plant watering songs, like Octopus’s Garden and Feria de las Flores (using her Abue’s new lyrics instead of the old sexist ones). But Samantha can’t help watering herself, too, which is nice in summer, but not in November.
She sits down on her book bed, puts on her old jacket and picks up the flashlight. Open on the bed is the American Girl book about Addy, who was born into slavery. Today Samantha can’t quite bear to read about how bad things were for her back then, so she skips ahead in the story to the picture of Addy smiling, in a pretty dress, after she and her mom escaped. On a sunny day, Samantha might go back and reread the earlier, scarier part of the story.
Samantha lays Addy down and shuffles through the piles of old books on her book bed, and then the piles lying on the floor nearby. She finds her special heap of old kids’ books, which she had been excited to find among all the mostly adult ones. She picks out Secret of the Old Clock.
It feels right to read the old-time books, like Nancy Drew, in this historical book room. The brand new American Girl books that Grandpa Blake gave her, and other books she takes out from school or the library, are okay to read here or in her bedroom, kitchen, or anywhere, but these old books from back in history need to be read here in this room. Or else on the porch when Samantha waits out there when her Abue is delayed at work. Rainwood House doesn’t have many rules, but this seems to be one of them.
Samantha has noticed that most of the old books in this room are about Black people, except for some like Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, and a few grown-up ones. Most of the books were written by Black people, also, at least from what she can tell when there’s a picture of the author.
What she hasn’t found are hardly any old books with Black children. Or children of any other color but White. (Samantha capitalizes these words in her mind as she thinks them, because, as her Abue says, people aren’t really the color black or the color white. Her Abue says those are made-up labels to divide people, like the plain and star-bellied Sneetches, but much worse.)
Samantha once tried to read a play she found in this room, called Raisin in the Sun. It sounded like it might be for kids, but was too difficult, so she had set it back down on the pile where she found it.
Samantha tiptoes around the piles of books, wishing she had somebody to help her pick them up and put them on shelves, which would be neater for the boarders, if any come in here. Drunella comes in with her, of course, but she doesn’t pick things up. And her Abue won’t come in here at all.
Samantha loves being in this room, which to her is like Rainwood House’s mind, while the basement is where Rainwood House’s engine is. Samantha knows that thought doesn’t make sense, but she likes thinking it anyway.
Samantha’s Abue sings songs from a CD called Stop Making Sense. Her Abue’s singing sounds more like the songs on albums than Samantha’s singing does, but it’s still different—different voice, different person, singing it into the air of a different place. And her Abue often changes the words. Really, almost everything is different. So, is it actually the same song?
She sits down on the book bed and pulls a raggedy blanket over her legs. She lays Secret of the Old Clock in her lap, but doesn’t open it. Instead, she keeps thinking about art being a thing and also not the thing. When she draws something on paper or on the computer screen, what she drew is not that thing–not even close. A drawing of a house, even a photo of a house, is so not an actual house.
Samantha remembers the picture of the pipe that artist drew, which she saw in an art book. Under the picture, he wrote in French, “This is not a pipe.” It made her laugh. Of course it wasn’t a pipe, it was a painting! And the book didn’t have the guy’s real painting, only a photo of it, which was even farther from being a pipe.
When her friend Kathrin sometimes looks at Samantha’s drawings and says houses don’t have eyes and girls don’t sit up on roofs, Samantha tells her it’s okay for drawings not to look like real life.
“What’s your opinion, Drunella?” Samantha addresses her invisible friend aloud, as she often does, but without looking at her. Detective Drunella is very shy. She’s standing, kind of shimmery, off to the side, near the boarded-up fireplace, peering at things through her magnifying glass. Drunella doesn’t reply, but her head nods a little bit in her green detective hat.
Samantha opens Secret of the Old Clock and reads a few paragraphs, but her own thoughts trickle through the printed words. Thoughts like: Nancy Drew is rich. She has her own car. She’s old—like 18. She has two good friends who always help her.
Samantha bites her lip. She knows friends in books are even less real than the pipe in the picture, but sometimes they still make her feel jealous. She glances sideways at Drunella, who is now looking through her magnifier at the clay sculptures on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.
Last week on the phone, Samantha asked her Mami Vivi about the clay figures on the mantel. Her Mami Vivi said she didn’t remember them. Of course, Samantha’s Mami Vivi was awfully young when she lived here at Rainwood House before her Grandpa Blake took her away to California; younger than Samantha is now. Samantha’s Mami Vivi was called Ana Violeta back then, before she even was her mother, before Samantha even existed—which seems totally unreal.
“Ana Violeta.” Samantha loves that name. She listens to the sound of it ripple through the room around all the books. She says it again: “Ana Violeta.” It sounds like music, which makes sense, because Violeta was the name of a famous music person from Chile, a country very far away, much farther than California or even Mexico.
Samantha thinks of the picture she once saw of that other Violeta from Chile, playing her guitar and smiling, but kind of sad, and with scraggly hair. Very different from her own Mami Vivi. Samantha agrees that, even though she loves the sound of her mother’s old name, “Vivi” fits her better. Her Mami Vivi’s friends in the theater troupe sometimes call her Pixie, because she has a smooth short haircut and looks like a small, bright, bouncy pixie.
Her Mami Vivi is very real. But she’s in California, and her voice comes through the phone all by itself leaving the rest of her behind, which if you think about it doesn’t seem real at all.
Samantha flips the pages of Secret of the Old Clock. Its paper is thicker and crumblier than new books from school or the library. The cover is a plain blue, kind of rough, with an embossed silhouette of Nancy and the clock. ‘Embossed’ and ‘silhouette’ are words her Abue taught her. Her Abue pays a lot of attention to English words and proper speaking. She doesn’t want anyone to think she can't speak English as well as somebody born here, just because she’s Mexican and her UMD Grounds Department shirt has a blue collar–which, anyway, is Samantha’s favorite color. Samantha thinks her Abue speaks better English than anybody, even though she always says Spanish is a prettier language.
Samantha loves passing her hand over the book’s cover, feeling the embossed drawing. Reading isn’t working well this afternoon, because of so many thoughts distracting her view of the pages, and also her flashlight battery is low and she can barely see the print.
As she lays Nancy Drew down on the pile, her mind bounces back to her Mami Vivi and the thing about realness. Her Mami Vivi is an actor. She and her compañeras y compañeros dress in costumes and do plays in parks or schools or community centers. Sometimes they perform during demonstrations or in strike camps.
Their plays are stories about people trying to get fair pay, or save their homes, or stop planes spraying poisons on the fields and the strawberry pickers. Some of the actors dress as greedy capitalistas or mean policías, and sometimes they have fights on stage. Samantha knows the actors are pretending, and the police batons are just soft foam. But she also knows that those bad things actually do happen to the people watching, and the real police batons aren’t soft at all.
Samantha pictures the bus with “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” painted in fancy circus letters on the side. The picture in her mind isn’t the real bus, of course, but thinking about it makes her feel proud and happy and little bit sad at the same time, because that bus is where she was born.
Samantha glances sideways through her eyelashes at the fireplace sculptures. Drunella is still there, examining them with her magnifying glass. Sometimes Samantha wishes she could look through Drunella’s glass, too, but she knows this can’t happen.
She wouldn’t say this out loud, not wanting to hurt Detective Drunella’s feelings, but sometimes she wishes Detective Drunella wouldn’t only pay attention to the things in Rainwood House but would also examine Samantha’s friends’ heads to see inside and tell Samantha what they’re thinking. Maybe she could explain why one minute things are going great, but then suddenly they’re going bad. And why sometimes people who used to like things you do suddenly stop liking those things. And even suddenly stop liking you. It’s confusing and makes Samantha’s stomach hurt.
But Drunella is not expert on friends, probably because of being invisible and only having one friend herself, who is Samantha. At least, as far as Samantha knows. What Drunella does while Samantha is at school is a mystery.
“¡Samantha! ¿Dónde estás?”
Her Abue is all kinds of real. From the sound of it, she’s been calling more than once. Samantha jumps up, steps out of the Book Room, and closes the door. “Coming, Abue!” she yells.
Seeing that her Abue has gone back to the kitchen, Samantha slings her leg over and slides down the slippery banister, which is fun even though she usually bumps her butt on the newel post.
This time, Samantha barely notices bumping at the bottom, because just as she gets there, she hears a knock at the door.
So fun to see the world through the eyes of this young one. Can't wait for the next installment.