by Pearl Cleage
"I won't go anywhere you don't invite me," he said, and ran his fingertip over my eyebrows. I closed my eyes.
"Can I touch your face?" he said.
"Yes."
"Can I touch your eyes?"
"Yes."
"Can I touch your mouth?" "Yes."
"Can I touch your shoulders?"
"Yes."
It was dark now and there were flickering shadows on the walls around us. He kissed my forehead, my cheeks, my chin.
"Can we take our clothes off?"
"Yes."
We slid out of our clothes and his body in the candlelight was as beautiful as it had been under the moon.
"Can I touch your breasts?"
"Yes."
"Your belly? Your beautiful soft behind? Your lovely legs?"
"Yes."
And he stroked and soothed and tickled and teased and looked and lingered and sighed and savored like he'd been waiting for this moment as long as I had. And when he saw that he was bringing me to the edge of someplace I truly wanted to be, he leaned over and asked me in the sweetest possible way if he could go with me, so I took him in my hands.
"Can I touch your penis?"
"Yes."
"Can I touch your balls?"
"Yes."
"Can I touch your nipples?"
"Yes."
By now, we were whispering the questions together into the darkness of each other's skin.
"Can I touch your heart? Your soul? Your spirit?"
And we sang the answers like a duet that we had practiced for a lifetime.
"Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Oh, baby, yes, yes, yes!"
18
Eddie wanted me to spend the night, but I wasn't ready for that yet. If it was a dream, I wanted to wake up in my own bed when it was over. After we got dressed and I was ready to start back, he held me and kissed me for a long time and I had enough sense to let him. It felt so right to be there that, of course, I started second-guessing myself immediately.
What the hell was I thinking about? This man has spent a lot of time and a lot of mental and physical energy trying to find a place where he could tap into some peace and quiet and here I come with a shitload of problems nobody wants to deal with if they don't absolutely have to. "Eddie?" I said. "What, baby?"
I leaned back to look into his face and the memory of how good his body felt close to mine made me want to just shut up, and if this was a fairy tale, just keep believing, at least for another minute or two. But I couldn't. I took a deep breath. "You're not pretending, are you?" "Pretending what?"
"That this is the beginning of something." "Isn't it?"
"You know what I mean." "No, I don't," he said. "I really don't." I took another breath. "Pretending," I said, hating the whiny tone in my voice. "That now we'll get together and get married and have some kids and all the rest of it."
He always took his own time answering questions, but this time it seemed like we stood there looking at each other for an hour before he said anything.
"I don't need any of that," he said. "I had a wife who was willing to help some people kill me so she could get high.
I had two kids I wouldn't recognize if they walked in here right now because they were born when I was too young to raise them and too crazy to love them. I'm not planning anything and I'm not pretending anything and I'm not expecting you to do anything except love me as hard and as strong as I'm going to love you." He kissed me then for what felt like another hour and when we finally came up for air, he was grinning. "Fair enough?"
I just nodded and leaned into his arms again. It wasn't like I had to rush right home or anything . . .
19
When i got home, Joyce was still up. I tried to ease in and go straight to bed, but Joyce wasn't having it.
"What are you grinning about?"
"Me?" I said, feeling the grin grow wider while I tried to deny it.
Joyce just stared, and as hard as I was trying to compose myself, I must have looked guilty as hell because she raised her eyebrows at me like I was fifteen years old sneaking in after curfew.
"I went by Eddie's," I said, still trying to sound nonchalant.
"Just a friendly visit?" she said, enjoying the futility of my efforts to look like I hadn't just been doin' it to death.
"Exactly."
"Well, there's nothing like good neighbors, I always say."
"Is that what you always say?"
Joyce looked at me and folded her arms calmly. "Don't try to distract me," she said. "Are you going to tell me everything or do I have to start guessing?"
"Nothing happened," I said, sounding so unconvincing even to myself that I had to laugh.
"I'll bet Eddie would be disappointed to hear you say that."
"All right," I said. "You win." And I told her what happened.
She whooped so loud I thought she'd wake up Imani, then she grabbed me in one of her famous bone-crushing hugs and tried to break a couple of my ribs. She looked as happy as I was, but then she got all serious and took my hand.
"You were safe, right?"
I wanted to be indignant, but it was such a loving question all the way around, I told her yes and she hugged me again.
"Ouch!" I said. "If you wanted me to seduce Eddie, all you had to do was tell me."
"I don't care a fig about you seducing anybody." Joyce says shit like that because she likes to read old British novels where the heroine is always described as high-spirited. She went through one phase when I was about twelve where if I asked her for money and she wasn't going to give it to me, she'd say, not a brass farthing.
"What I care about," she said, "is you sticking around here for a while."
"In Idlewild?"
"Don't say it like that," Joyce said. "You could do worse."
"I'm going to San Francisco at the end of August, Joyce. I can't stay here."
"Eddie going, too?"
I tried to act surprised at the question, but Joyce was doing what she always doessaying things out loud before I'm ready to fess up to them. The truth of the matter was, ever since we made love, my brain has been feeding me fantasies. Me and Eddie, driving across the country in a convertible that neither of us owns. Me and Eddie walking beside San Francisco Bay at sunset. Me and Eddie finding a place to live in one of those mixed-up San Francisco neighborhoods where everybody is a little bit of somebody else and nobody cares. Me and Eddie exploring just how sexy safe sex can be. Of course, none of these scenarios included me evolving into a person with full-blown AIDS, but that's why they call them fantasies, right?
"We haven't discussed it," I said, sounding prim.
Joyce grinned at me like she always does when I'm tap-dancing around the truth, but I didn't break. I was headed for San Francisco because I needed a new life and a new lover. The suggestion that maybe I was about to find all that in my own backyard was still just a little too Candide for me.
"Okay," Joyce said, shifting gears to throw me off. "If I've only got another six weeks, I better put you to work."
"I don't have to start tonight, do I?" I yawned. All I wanted to do was fall into bed and wait for my dreams to show up.
"No, sweetie." Joyce squeezed my shoulders and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. She smelled like home. I hugged her.
"I'll start first thing tomorrow," I said. "Bright and early."
"It's a deal," she said. "Now, get some sleep."
"Thank you, ma'am," I said, heading for the hallway before I remembered how dangerous it is to give Joyce an open-ended agreement. "Joyce?"
"Yes?"
"What is it exactly that you want me to do?"
She grinned at me. "I'm sure I'll think of something."
Just before I fell asleep, I wondered how I'd feel the next time I saw Eddie. Well, that's not really true. I knew how I'd feel. I was worried about him. About whether or not he'd regret anything once he had a chance to think it through. I had been truly exhilarated by our first exchange. I was nervous at first, we b
oth were, but we just kept trying this and touching that and we laughed a lot.
That was the best surprise. Most brothers are so worried about being the biggest or the baddest or the best you
ever had that having fun ain't even in it. Not Eddie. He knew how to make me feel good and he knew how to let me make him feel good. That's the other thing a lot of brothers don't understand. When it comes to making love, reciprocity is everything.
I decided I was too exhausted and too satisfied to worry about what was going to happen next. I closed my eyes and whispered a thank-you to whatever spirits were hovering in the darkness, and for the first time in a long time, I didn't ask for a damn thing. I'm not greedy, and as of tonight, by any measure I can think of to apply, I'm already a little bit ahead.
2O
Even though i thought I'd sleep until noon, I woke up at six o'clock like an alarm had gone off inside my head. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn't. I had so much energy I felt like I could run the marathon. Nothing like some good lovin' to give you a new lease on life.
I didn't hear Joyce and Imani up yet, so I put on my sweats and my walking shoes quietly and I slipped out the back door. If Eddie was feeling anything like I was, I figured he'd be around sooner rather than later. My plan was to do my walk, take a quick shower, and be casually arranged on the back porch looking good by the time he pulled up.
The only problem was, when I rounded the first curve of the road, I saw Eddie coming my way. I guess we both had that energy surge.
"You're up early," I said, glad he greeted me with a kiss as warm and sweet as the one he'd said good-bye with last night.
"So are you."
HP touched my cheek gently and smiled. I leaned into his hand and loved the strength I felt there. "How did you sleep?" he asked.
I was amazed to feel myself blushing. "Like a baby," I said.
He laughed that laugh for me and I wanted to bury my face in the softness of all that hair. "Good. Want some company or are you walking solo this morning by choice?"
"I'd love some company," I said, and he fell in beside me like we'd planned it.
We walked for almost an hour, and every time I felt like I needed to say something, by the time I turned toward Eddie, I realized there was nothing to be said. It was the most comfortable kind of silence. All I heard was the birds waking up, the summer swish of the trees over our heads and the sound of the gravel road crunching under our feet.
By the time we wound our way back to Eddie's dock, the sun was up and sparkling on the placid surface of the lake and a cardinal was singing so loud it sounded like somebody paid him.
"I've been thinking about what you said last night," Eddie said after we'd been sitting there for a minute.
"I said a lot of stuff last night as I recall."
"About this," he said. "About knowing what this is."
"And what did you decide?"
He put his arm around me and pulled me over closer to him. I could feel the warmth of his skin beneath his T-shirt and his breath against my cheek.
"It's love," he whispered. "And you know what else?"
"What?" I said, whispering back.
"It ain't gonna get nothin' but better."
I truly wanted to believe him. "You promise?"
"Cross my heart."
I let myself relax against his arm.
"Okay," I said. "It's a deal."
21
When aretha
"Do you want to watch?" I said, handing her the mirror, but she shook her head. "I trust you."
I laid the mirror facedown on the table and walked around to face Aretha. I put my hand under her chin and gently turned her head so I could see both profiles. I walked a complete circle around her. Joyce jiggled Imani gently against her shoulder and waited. So did Aretha.
"This is going to be the perfect haircut," I said, "to take you into the next phase of your life."
"Really?" she said, wide-eyed and delighted. "Absolutely," I said. "Only free women can wear their hair this short."
"What about Joyce?" said Aretha, nodding at Joyce's braids.
"Only free women can wear their hair like this," I said,
"but not all free women do wear their hair like this."
"Oh," said Aretha, and I was glad that was the right answer. We have such a mystical connection to our hair. Guilt and glory, pride and pain. I knew what it meant to be a sixteen-year-old black girl and cut your hair short. The sweet part was, Aretha knew it, too. She handed me the clippers.
Her hair had been pressed and permed and processed so many times, it didn't know if it was coming or going, but once I trimmed it down to about two inches of new growth, it was soft and fluffy as lamb's wool. I gave her a quick sham- poo, including my world-famous hard wash and deep conditioner, cut it down to about a quarter of an inch, and shaped it into the prettiest little Afro you ever saw.
Now, Aretha may grow up to be a lovely woman. She may bloom in the glow of her first love. She may blossom with the birth of her children and wear her later years with full confidence in her glory, but I'll tell you this: she will never be more beautiful than she was when I picked up that mirror and held it for her. She gasped. Joyce applauded.
"Is it okay?" I said.
Aretha never took her eyes from the mirror. "It looks like me," she said softly.
"It is you," Joyce said, but I knew what Aretha meant. Sometimes you meet yourself on the road before you have a chance to learn the appropriate greeting. Faced with your own possibilities, the hard part is knowing a speech is not required. All you have to say is yes.
22 eddie swung back, by this afternoon to give us a piece of bad news. Somebody broke into old Johnny Mack's house last night and found him asleep in his bedroom. They put a pillow over his face so he couldn't see them and then roughed him up a little. He wasn't badly hurt, but the other oldsters are all terrified.
Eddie still thinks Frank and Tyrone are the ones doing the burglaries, but Joyce said she can't see them doing something like this. She thinks it might be some of the migrant workers who stayed around after the last picking jobs finished up.
"The man is old enough to be their great-grandfather. Plus, he didn't hardly have anything to steal. They took a little old black-and-white TV with rabbit-ear antennae on the top and a bunch of change he had in a jar on the kitchen table." Joyce still doesn't understand that this is what crack addicts do. Eddie understands it, though. He told Joyce whoever it is, we ought to start keeping a shotgun in the house. Joyce is scared of guns, so that freaked her out big time.
"Think of it as living on the frontier," I said. "Peace-loving black women used to have shotguns around all the time as a way of keeping things peaceful."
Joyce knew we were right, but she didn't have to like it. Finally she just shook her head at Eddie like a disappointed Sunday school teacher.
"And you call yourself a Buddhist!" We just looked at her for a minute and then we all started laughing. When we calmed down, Eddie said, "You know I love Brother Buddha, but until he reincarnates as a black man in America, I think we better go with what we know."
Joyce said she'd think about it, but I know she doesn't want to have a gun in here. I think she figures if it was Frank and Tyrone, she could talk them out of it. People always think that, but they're wrong. Crack changes everything. It's why Eartha could leave Imani and not look back. I'll be willing to bet all the money I got from selling the salon that the first thing she did when she left the hospital was go looking for the crack man. Her daughter was the last thing on her mind. I remember when the stories started coming out about mothers on crack. A woman has a baby in the bathtub of the crack house, cuts the cord, and leaves it there to die while she goes back in the bedroom to get high. A woman gives her preadolescent daughter to the crack dealer in exchange for some rock. A woman shoots her grandmother who wouldn't keep her kids and give her money to buy crack.
I kept reading these stories and it was real clear to me that something basic w
as changing. What kind of life can you ^ncaihlv conceive of when you're nine years old and your mama delivers you to the dope man because your virginity is all she's got left to trade?
I guess I was naive to think that Idlewild could escape all of that. It almost doesn't matter what black community you go in now, the problems are exactly the same. The kids are angry. The men are shell-shocked. The women are alone and the drugs are everywhere.
I sure picked a hell of a time to fall in love.
23
Yesterday eddie started teaching us a little t'ai chi. Imani sat in her baby seat looking at us twisting around on the grass in our bare feet. I swear she must have thought we were crazed. Joyce is still pretty out of shape even though we've been walking two miles a day, so she quit after a few minutes, but I was liking it. I wanted to get good enough to do it like Eddie. His arms and legs just flow into the motions like water. It's almost a dance. He just smiles and leans to the left. Smiles and leans to the right.
Looks easy as pie, but don't believe it. I almost killed myself. When I woke up this morning, I couldn't hardly sit up. When I told Eddie, he just smiled and said the soreness would go away once I got back in shape. I liked that he said back in shape. Made it sound like I'd been there before and just stepped out for a minute.
Joyce wants to build an altar. She's been reading all these books about the Goddess. When she prays before we eat, now she says Mother/Father God. It's weird, but I like it. I never saw God as an old white guy anyway. In my mind he always looks sort of like my grandfather: tall and tan and like he's been working too hard.
I told her to be careful with that altar stuff, though. I don't want her to fool around and call up the wrong spirits.
August
1
Now that her first meeting outside the church went so well, Joyce is busy trying to give a little more structure to the Sewing Circus so she can start formalizing the programs and raise some money. She wanted to start by changing the name, but the membership liked the old one. It reminded me of something a career campaign worker told me at the end of a long, drunken evening after his well-financed, well-spoken candidate crashed and burned at the polls.
