What We've Lost Is Nothing Read online

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  3.Help with finding upholsterer?

  Posted by: “Ellen” [email protected] Ellen Lancaster

  Tues Apr 6, 2004 5:10 p.m. (CST)

  Anyone know a good upholsterer in the area that doesn’t cost a fortune?

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  4.Free train table and Legos

  Posted by: “blabbingmums” [email protected] blabbingmums

  Tues Apr 6, 2004 5:20 p.m. (CST)

  Our little one has outgrown the train table and complete set of starter Legos. Free to first one who gets in touch . . . very good condition. Contact for pics: 708-555-3275

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  5.New kids dance cooperative in river forest

  Posted by: “OPRFdance” [email protected] OPRFdance

  Tues Apr 6, 2004 5:45 p.m. (CST)

  Come join the fun in our brand new studio on Lake Street, just across from the Jewel. Open house this Saturday from 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Classes from toddler through teen! Jazz, gymnastics, ballet, movement, music and yoga. New schedule starts May 1. Drop off or stay and watch. Combination packages available. We’d love to see you! Check our website for discounts and news about new classes.

  www.oprfdance.com

  708-555-4227

  [email protected]

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  6.Mass robberies on Ilios Lane!!

  Posted by: “Stevenson/Blair” [email protected] Robert Stevenson

  Tues Apr 6, 2004 6:30 p.m. (CST)

  Not sure of the whole story, but apparently residents of Ilios Lane have had a number of robberies this afternoon. Mostly electronics taken . . . watching breaking news now on television. Police chief is asking all to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior, or dumped goods in alleyways, etc. seems there aren’t any leads yet, but just a reminder to keep doors locked, and make sure alarm systems are up to date. No one injured, but v. scary. Will post more as I learn more.

  Robert Stevenson/Mandy Blair

  Washington Blvd.

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  Chapter 7

  7:10 p.m.

  Truly, honestly, we are people who have a lot,” Susan had told a reporter whose name and newspaper she could not remember. Was it the Sun-Times? The Defender? The Tribune? They all arrived at once, parking just beyond the yellow police tape that ran from her house all the way across the street to Arthur’s. The whole of Ilios Lane blocked off. A makeshift press conference set up in the McPhersons’ front yard, Detective Wasserman presiding, offering updates on the investigation: “At this time, we believe every home on the street to be affected. Eight in all. The investigation is ongoing; at this time there are no leads. Anyone with information leading to the arrest and prosecution . . .” It was the standard press release. He took no questions.

  “To live here,” Susan had said, speaking sometime after Wasserman as she stood beside her husband, Michael, “the place is special.”

  Oak Park. The spirit of the place electrified her. People such as Hemingway and Edgar Rice Burroughs had lived here. Frank Lloyd Wright and the dancer Doris Batcheller Humphrey. The writer Carol Shields, the actors Bob Newhart and John Mahoney. Oak Park wasn’t a place to live, it was a way of life. A COMMUNITY OF LIFE, so proclaimed a banner at her office.

  Susan worked at the Oak Park Community Housing Office on the village’s west side, across from the train tracks that split North and South Boulevard. She was officially titled an escort—a name that had never sat quite right with her. She wasn’t merely showing people places to live, she was showing progressivism, tolerance, community in idealized form. She was showing that the present could right the ills of the past. If those she escorted could grow to love the village as she had, they’d stay. They’d put their kids in the respectable public school system here. They’d become community activists. Oak Park was not one of those molded, socially conservative suburbs awash in chain stores.

  She kept her showings to the east side, the side that began with Austin Boulevard near the west side of Chicago. The bad side of Chicago, so many believed. The gang-dominated, drug-addled, violent (and, no one said it, but it was implied, black) side of Chicago. Austin Boulevard lay at the seam. Ilios Lane just three blocks west of the seam.

  Susan McPherson spent her days convincing young, semi-urban white kids (she thought of anyone in his or her twenties as a kid) that Chicago’s west side offered no threat to their potential idyll in Oak Park. How many times had she cited the statistics? How many times had she talked about the beautiful homes that lay east of Austin Boulevard? But inevitably, they’d have a friend of a friend who’d been mugged on Austin, or they’d heard the story of a carjacking from those Austin gangs. She constantly fought against fear and perception.

  Back in the late sixties and early seventies, Oak Park became the site of a curious social experiment, an attempt to get whites and minorities—mostly blacks—to live together in harmony. Diversity Assurance, it was called. Oak Park’s west side was predominantly white and affluent. The east side was populated by minorities. The village trustees devoted significant resources to encourage east-side integration, to get whites to move to these predominately black apartment buildings. Susan’s own street, Ilios Lane, was another matter. One couldn’t force homeownership, but devoting her working life to diversity in rental units, then returning home to her nearly homogenous cul-de-sac, had irked her for years. Back in the early twentieth century there had been no great visual separation between east Oak Park and west Chicago. Not like now, when flowers and plush green courtyards populated Oak Park’s once-notorious east side, and just across the street, from Austin Boulevard east, trash and rusted iron gates announced the start of the city. Slowly, in the wake of the Great Depression, when people and banks and businesses were terrified, Chicago became one of hundreds of urban areas redlined, where mortgages weren’t given to anyone wanting to live in neighborhoods—so read the literature Susan gave to her ­clients—“in decline,” where Realtors and developers, block by block,

  created white flight by convincing them their neighborhoods were being overtaken by blacks. Insurers often rejected black residents seeking mortgage loans while community reinvestment funds dried up. And so the marginally poor, marginally black areas became poorer and blacker as the suburbs of Chicago, of Philadelphia, of Atlanta flourished.

  Diversity Assurance was supposed to be one antidote for redlining and blockbusting. Indeed, the program, and others like it, had cleaned up Oak Park, solidified it with gardens, trash-free lawns, young urban professionals all over the east side. Susan McPherson guided would-be residents through all the beautiful vintage apartments the Austin Boulevard area had on offer. Susan sold her clients on the history of the buildings, architecture that had survived Chicago’s race riots, a famous doorway where one of Al Capone’s midlevel henchmen was found with a knife protruding from his rib cage. It was about creating a community even for renters, where you knew who lived next door, and in this way you all kept one another safe and happy and feeling as if you were part of something. The village of Oak Park gave landlords grants to renovate their east-side apartment buildings in the hopes of encouraging more whites to move there. They hired apartment managers to keep their buildings clean, their tenants happy, to encourage more diverse populations to take up residence. By the 1990s, whites had moved to the east side in droves, attracted by the area’s beautiful brownstones and vintage apartments with their original woodwork, their claw-foot tubs, t
heir leafy, oak-lined boulevards. It was a testament to cultural and racial diversity. The apartment managers did hold Sunday potluck brunches in the courtyards of their buildings where blacks and whites (sometimes, but not always) would share bratwurst and baked beans. They started recycling programs and community services. They built honor-system libraries and reading rooms in the basements of their buildings, filled mostly with romances and old medical textbooks. They planted collective herb gardens and swept their alleyways. And they introduced neighbors to neighbors, friends to friends. They looked out for each other. It wasn’t an apartment, Susan always told her clients, it was a cause.

  Still, pockets of problems remained, buildings such as the one where Caz lived on Madison and Austin, where muggings weren’t infrequent, and a shooting several years back held the ­corner captive to old reputations. Susan knew more than most how old reputations lingered. Few of the young folks she escorted failed to mention the terrifying proximity of Chicago’s west side. Half those who loved an apartment on the east side still ended up moving to Oak Park’s west side. Or into parts of Chicago they imagined were safer, ­Lincoln Park, Bucktown, Wicker Park, Lake­view. But Susan McPherson liked to brag how demographers from all over the world came to study the magic formula of Oak Park. You’d find her name, she sometimes laughed, in academic papers from Denmark, ­Germany, France.

  Then September 11 changed everything. Crime was still low, lower than it had ever been, but the statistics didn’t reflect the mood of the people. When an Oak Park white man was beaten by three black teenagers who’d come over from the west side during the winter of 2002, the village board began to wonder if the Diversity Assurance program had run its course. Then a series of carjackings by blacks on the west side of Chicago hit the local press, and parts of the Diversity Assurance program were temporarily suspended pending further investigation. Another assault followed, this time by unknown assailants, though the rumor circulated that it was again, of course, another group of young, black men from the west side. People suddenly began to feel unsafe in Oak Park. Maybe Diversity Assurance had achieved all the success it ever would.

  The white police chief, Brian Mazzoli, wrote several op-ed pieces for the Oak Park Outlook in which he decried the rumors of increased crime. He used statistics to prove that despite what anyone thought, crime was actually down. Significantly down from what it had been twenty years earlier. Carjackings had dropped by half since 1991, and muggings by two-thirds. The man beaten in the alleyway? That wasn’t racially motivated; that was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “When it comes to the matter of crime,” wrote the police chief, “it is most often a matter of bad luck.”

  Susan McPherson did not mention the controversy to her clients. And Chief Mazzoli’s numbers could not contain the angst of the village. The whole country had been attacked, and if trickle-down theories didn’t work economically, they certainly worked sociologically, psychologically. Oak Park had caught the disease of the country at large, the post-9/11 pandemic that took over hearts, minds, logic, the reason and compassion of people who, just a day, a week, a month earlier believed themselves free from prejudice. Free from the thoughts of isolationism and insularity and separatism that quickly began to creep into their conversations. Fear took hold and stayed. How fragile it had all become. How untenable. What had taken a generation to build in Oak Park was slowly eroding in a few short years. The landlords pounded their fists in frustration, argued to the village trustees, to the office of village grants, to escorts such as Susan, that they had empty apartments in need of renovation, or renovated apartments in need of renters, that they could not survive without this system of buffers built into the grand experiment that was east Oak Park. In the post–September 11 world, you couldn’t keep some people from believing that anyone not standing with you was against you.

  So this was the mood by the spring of 2004, the canopy underneath which the mass burglary had transpired. Susan’s unshakable belief in the rightness of her community seemed, finally, as if it might have been flawed. She didn’t want to think that things like Diversity Assurance worked at first, maybe for a generation, but then humans became humans again, falling to their basest selves.

  She wondered, in those first few hours after the burglaries, not so much about what was missing from where, not so much about what she’d really lost, but about how she would rise tomorrow morning, walk into the dusty, aging offices of the Oak Park Community Housing Office, and tell her fresh-faced clients, “Yes, indeed. No better place than my Oak Park to rest your weary head. Diversity is the way of the future!” But my street? My home? What could she say if someone asked her? What might it mean to spend all these years fighting for something that would only, in the end, betray you?

  Who, she feared someone might finally ask her, who are your neighbors?

  Because the truth was, she didn’t really know.

  Chapter 8

  6:23 p.m.

  Sofia sat on her knees as she usually did when she spoke to her parents, not because of a desire to prostrate herself, so much as a lack of furniture in their living room. A lot happened on the floor: eating, talking, watching TV, homework, sometimes even sleeping. Her father had called her cousins to come over because he held a staunch belief in the collective. That one family member’s tragedy was shared tragedy. After he was finished, he handed the phone to her and didn’t need to tell her why. She made the call to the Oak Park police station to inform them that, indeed, she was not missing and arranged to collect her school picture at the front desk. She told the police that her cheerleading practice had run late. She could say anything, she knew, because her parents rarely grasped the context of any conversation. Yet, Sofia, for the most part, didn’t lie, didn’t fabricate stories. She often wondered why. The things she could get away with! She could have gotten money for fictitious school activities, as she suspected her cousins did. She could have stretched her curfew, redefined critical aspects of her life like other immigrant kids. Yet she did not.

  She thought it had something to do with love and something to do with shame. Her entire life she’d watched her parents misunderstand and misinterpret the world around them, and she’d realized that this made her feel protective of them, made her like their parent. The result was a childhood spent shielding her parents from the world, which was ironic given all she knew they’d survived.

  Sofia was born in Chicago, but her parents had grown up in Cambodia. Her father’s brother, her uncle Nimith, had sponsored their immigration to the United States. Sofia loved her parents’ stories from Cambodia, even the ones filled with violence or death or hunger or poverty. The distant relatives who’d died in the genocide—“Pol Pot Time,” as her mother called it—even the uncle Sofia never knew who’d been killed on his bicycle delivering bales of lemongrass to the Boeung Kak Market. She especially loved their tales about nature and spirits and palm trees.

  Most of the more graphic stories she’d heard came from her three older cousins. They spent their weekends together, lounging on Montrose or Edgewater Beach and eating fish amok on Argyle Street, swapping tales about their relatives.

  “You know our grandmother was, like, crazy,” her cousin Ken told her once.

  “Don’t say that, Ken,” scolded his older brother, Sit.

  “I’m just saying, she didn’t die in the Pol Pot Time or anything. She died ’cause she was crazy.”

  “Shut up, Ken.”

  Their two families met at a Vietnamese restaurant that day (“Not as good as Cambodian food,” her mother declared, “but acceptable”), and the kids had a corner booth to themselves. Sofia didn’t much care for fish amok—white fish in coconut milk steamed inside a banana leaf—but she loved the way it looked. And she loved coming to the city, to Argyle Street, which was more or less taken up by Vietnamese and Cambodians. The smell of noodle soup permeated the sidewalks, and everything from yellow candles to incense to Kaffir-lime leaves
and dried jasmine buds was on offer. It was the closest her family got to home.

  On the ride into the city, Sofia had noticed a row of fake palms with bright blue and pink and yellow leaves along the lakefront. The waxy plastic trees felt like an affront to her and made her suspicious of a place that believed if it couldn’t have whatever it wanted when it wanted it, a facsimile was perfectly adequate in its stead.

  “I just think Sophea should know about her grandma,” Ken told Sit.

  “What?” she’d asked. “Tell me what, Sit?” Sofia knew next to nothing about her grandmother.

  Sit buried his face in a bowl of pho, slurping the noodles loudly enough to make the rest of them go silent. Sit’s father glared at him from the next booth.

  “Come on, Ken. Why was she crazy?” Sofia asked.

  Sit glared at Ken, but didn’t shush him this time when he began to talk.

  Sofia’s grandmother’s husband disappeared at the height of the Cambodian genocide, as did her eldest daughter. That left her with two sons, Sofia’s father and her uncle Nimith. One day, when she was walking to the creek behind their hut to wash laundry, she spotted a bloated figure in black pajamas. It was not unusual, bodies turning up. All her neighbors had stumbled upon bodies, tried to save themselves from the fates that befell others. The bodies were often not recognizable as bodies, Ken told Sofia. In the water, skin fell off like chunks of steamed fish. The bloated body in the creek had a large, darkened birthmark on the back of its neck. This mark, Ken said, stole Sofia’s grandmother’s mind.

  “Who?” Sofia asked. “Tell me who it was.”

  “Oum Chhaya,” Sit interjected, taking over the story from Ken. “Our father’s elder sister.”

  She’d disappeared long ago, but her body had just washed ashore. Sofia’s grandmother lost her mind after that. She began to mumble and wander the village. Once the Khmer Rouge had fallen, she shaved her head in the manner of widows and took to wearing white, the color of death. She slept little. She carried shards of glass in her sarong and would gum the smooth sides when she grew nervous.