Hold Love Strong

by Matthew Aaron Goodman

  Our apartment became a mess. Empty soda cans, paper cups, glasses, and plastic bags filled with wrappers and Styrofoam containers were left beside the couch. Sneakers and socks were left in random spots, and stains dappled the grey carpet as if sprung from some pulsing well below. In the kitchen, pans with crisps of food floating in used oil and pots with murky spaghetti water sat on the stove, spilled drinks and food made tacky spots on the linoleum floor, and birdseed was strewn around the edge of the lovebirds’ cage.

  Then late one evening I came home from playing basketball at the park with my ball on my hip and squiggling lines of dried sweat dancing down my cheeks. I was eleven and my childhood love of basketball as a game had grown into my great escape. While playing at the park, there was nothing else, no Ever, no wondering about the whereabouts of my mother or Donnel, no having to defend myself, no familial or emotional or communal pain, just running, jumping, leaping. I could channel everything into it. Playing basketball steeled me. It blinded me and made me deaf to truth.

  All of the lights in the apartment were off. It was no surprise to me. Eric and Donnel could be with friends. My mother could be out. My aunt too. My grandma could have been working overtime or she could have come home early from work and gone to sleep. I did not turn on the living room light because I didn’t want to see the mess around me. I walked slowly, never lifting my feet more than an inch in case a plate or bowl or a shoe might be waiting to trip me. I made it to the kitchen’s threshold safely. I was hungry. The light switch was to my immediate left. I reached up and flicked the switch. As they did each time the light was turned on in the kitchen, the lovebirds chirped and tweeted.

  But I didn’t hear them. I didn’t hear them because as soon as the kitchen lit up I gasped. It was a petrifying sight. My grandma stood on a kitchen chair in her underwear and a white T-shirt that only reached the uppermost part of her thighs. She held a near empty bottle of Boone’s Farm wine in one hand and specks of blood were spattered on her feet and shins. On the floor was one of the red bricks Donnel ran with and a dead rat, smashed and leaking blood. My grandma had killed the rat, followed the sound of its pattering feet and squeaking as it walked about the kitchen then hurled the brick where she was sure the rat was. The thud she described as the sound of a dropped carton of milk hitting the floor. The rat’s squeal she described as a nail on a chalkboard. The rat had then stumbled about, wheezing and moaning like an old man with emphysema as it dragged its busted body on the floor until it could drag its death no more. Then the rat breathed a few last heavy breaths and died. But until I turned on the light, my grandma didn’t know where the rat had stopped, where it had crumpled and stiffened. And so she remained on the chair, drinking the wine she originally opened to fortify her against the rat and then continued to drink because she could not stand the thought that she had killed something so brutally, and because she was afraid if she climbed off the chair she’d step on the rat’s bloody body.

  “Abraham,” she said, her voice full of sad breath.

  Her eyes were only half opened, and she was too exhausted and drunk to be surprised to see me. She rubbed her face in a sloppy, forceful fashion, burrowing the heel of her hand into each eye then dragging her hand beneath her nose, over her lips and chin, and down her neck. She dropped her eyes to the floor and looked at the bloody tracks the rat had made and where its life ended, halfway between us in a pool of blood. Then she raised her bottle of wine level with her eyes, swirled its contents to see how much she had left, and swigged it down in one gulp. She studied the empty bottle for a moment. Then she lifted her eyes up the length of my body, ascending my legs and torso until she met my eyes. Although we were ten feet apart, I felt her weight lean on me. Her eyes drooped and seemed sure to burst. Her lips trembled. She slapped her free hand over them and this caused her eyes to close, which caused tears to flood her face. Suddenly, she was aware of our reality.

  “Abraham,” she said.

  Then she stopped everything: speaking, breathing, and crying. She wiped her face with her hand again. Then she stood as tall as she could.

  “Come,” she said raising her chin, focusing, forcing her eyes wide and pressing a wobbled but determined look on me. “Help me get this mess cleaned up. Hurry. Before anyone else has got to see it.”

  III

  A sodden soiled flag.

  “Abraham! Abraham! Mister Man! Don’t get on that bus!”

  It was my mother. It was the winter and it was raining and it was early in the morning so the sky was a hue between black and blue with an undertone of pallid light. She was outside in her powder blue house slippers, an oversized red T-shirt, and a pair of dirty white leggings. I was waiting for the city bus to go to school with two dozen young brothers and sisters from Ever. My mother waved her hands over her head and ran through the parking lot. She was braless and her breasts bounced. She lifted her knees too high for the pace she was going. I was embarrassed, ashamed. What was she doing? What did she want? I glanced down the street. The bus was coming.

  “Abraham!” she hollered. “Abraham! Wait!”

  She came to the edge of the sidewalk across the street and stopped short, her momentum causing her to rise up on her toes as if everything but her feet wanted to leap into the street, the oncoming traffic. Between the fingers of her right hand was a cigarette. She jammed it between her lips, yanked it out, and jammed it in again. She looked left and right, threw the cigarette down, and wrapped her arms around her chest. The bus was almost there. She glared at me. She shivered. A car passed. She looked right again, saw the bus, and looked back at me with angry, begging eyes. She was frantic, but her franctiness was stuck beneath her skin, as if a great desperation was burning and pounding to get out of her body.

  The bus pulled up, its steel body a wall between my mother and me. Brothers and sisters from Ever climbed onto the bus. One by one, they glanced back at me. I wondered what I should do. I wanted to get on the bus. I wanted to leave her, disappear from sight. It was January and I was in a foul mood. Things I loved, gifts I’d been given for Christmas and my birthdays were suddenly missing, lost, gone forever no matter how I scoured our apartment, no matter how many times I told on Donnel and Eric, no matter how I claimed they had taken my most precious possessions and ordered that they give them back. Although Donnel and Eric swore they didn’t have them, although they even helped me look for my missing things, I called them liars and fought them. I criticized the way they looked, how they smelled, and I predicted what they were going to be, dumb niggas, criminals, fat, anything and everything that might damage them. I called them retarded, queer, and white. Someone stole my stuff. Like my Discman my grandma bought for me. And like my gold chain with my name on it that had gone missing the previous Friday, incredibly vanishing from my neck sometime between when I feel asleep on the couch and when I stood in the shower the next morning.

  “Abraham!” my mother screamed. “Abraham!”

  My friends watched me out of the bus windows. They waved and shook their heads and pointed at me. They laughed. They were sure I’d done something wrong. The bus driver, a dark-skinned heavyset brother who wore leather driving gloves, leaned over his steering wheel and looked out of the door at me.

  “Hey,” he said. “You getting on or what?”

  There was a jagged rock lodged in my throat, balanced on a precarious ledge. I closed my eyes, squeezed them tight, saw red, and then I swallowed, opened my eyes, and said, “Go. I’ll get the next one,” because if I didn’t I would have climbed on the bus and looked at my mother out of the window and the rock in my throat would have plummeted, ripped a wound all the way to the soles of my feet instead of stopping in my stomach.

  So the bus pulled away and it was just she and I, my mother and me. Only the width of the street separated us. She stepped off the sidewalk. A car was coming. It jammed on its brakes and honked and the driver angrily threw up his hands. My mother paid him no mind. I was sure she was going to get hit, if not by one car then by a
nother. But my mother walked without fear. She crossed the street as if no cars were coming, her eyes fixed on me, like a ghost, like she was indestructible and made of gas. She wasn’t working anymore. She didn’t quit her job at McDonald’s. She didn’t get fired. She just stopped going, gave up waking herself. And when she did wake herself, she might disappear for days or sit on the couch, staring at the television, an emotional, combustible wreck who’d come after me with anything she could grab, shoes, plates, utensils, Donnel’s bricks, Nice’s trophies when I crossed her, when I asked her a question like where had she been or if she’d seen something, whatever thing of mine that had recently disappeared. But there was more, something else. My mother had lost weight and she did crazy things, like coming outside as she was, not caring what she looked like to the world, dressed as if it were an early Sunday summer morning and the only people outside were crackheads, men and women who worked early Sunday morning shifts, and those who needed one item, that milk, those eggs, that roll of toilet paper so they hastily made their way to the corner store dressed in what they’d slept in, as thrown together and disheveled as she was.

  “Abraham,” my mother said, stopping just short of me, standing on the street, the cold billows of breath tumbling from her mouth. “Where’s that money Momma gave you?”

  “What money?” I asked.

  “Don’t play with me,” she scolded. “The money Momma gave you for lunch.”

  “The dollar?” I asked.

  She screwed her eyes. “Is that all it was?”

  “That’s all it ever is.”

  She thrust her hand into the air between us and left it there, lying flat, collecting rain. “Give it to me.”

  “But it’s for me to get something to eat.”

  “I don’t care what it’s for. I need it. Now give it here.”

  One dollar, that’s all she wanted; all she was desperate for. I stared at her hand for a moment and then I lifted my eyes, put them even with hers. Her eyes were brown but her pupils were so large I could see my reflection in each black disc. I didn’t have an umbrella. My coat was soaked. Water dripped down my face.

  “Abraham,” my mother screamed. “Stop looking at me like that! Give me that dollar!”

  I hadn’t been looking at her. That is, I was looking at a woman who used to be her, a woman who was so absent all that was left was the rain soaking a shirt and making it cling and stick to the sodden sacks that were her breasts. Her nipples were hard. She didn’t even have the wherewithal to hide them, to fold her arms across her chest, to know she was cold. I was dumbed, numbed. I jammed my wet hand into my wet jeans and pulled out the dollar bill.

  She snatched it from my fingers. “What about change?” she asked. “You got change from yesterday or the day before?”

  Who was she? Who was this woman glaring at me? I stared at her, searched her face for the slightest intimation. Her lips were chapped. Her eyebrows were unkempt, misshapen. When was the last time she had plucked them? I never knew she had sprigs of hair between her eyes. And her fingers? Her nails were gnawed to nubs and her cuticles were dry. Some were even bloody. Mom? Mother? Ma? Ms. Singleton? Sister of Roosevelt and Rhonda? Aunt of Donnel and Eric? Daughter of Gloria? Hey? You? Angela? Jelly? Mother of Abraham? Lady from apartment 4C?

  A surging hatred pulsed in her face, made the black bags beneath her eyes sink deeper, darker. Her nostrils flared. Suddenly she coughed, hacking three times with such force that her torso twisted and her chin slammed against her chest. I thought she was going to fall down. I was sure she would buckle and crumble. And then she stopped. She cleared her throat with a rumbling gargle and spit a wad of dark green phlegm on the wet black street. Then she lifted her eyes to me. What did she see? Who was I to her? She looked hungry, starved.

  She rushed at me, grabbed me, and slammed her hands in my coat pockets. She wrenched out lint and threw it over her shoulder. She dug with her fingers and found a pen cap, a paperclip, a candy wrapper and threw them down on the wet street. She smashed her hands in the front pockets of my jeans, rooted around and yanked them out. Then she stepped back and smiled a smile that was sick because she was my mother and I was her son and her smile was selfish and insincere.

  “I knew you was lying,” she said. She laughed. She held a quarter and two pennies up for me to see. “What’s this? Huh? Abraham? What’s this? Nothing?”

  My mother clenched her fist around the change and swung around. Cars were coming, passing left and right. She hesitated. She started, then stopped, then she walked like walking was something new to her, crossing the street in a spastic, teetering rush, oncoming cars slowing, stopping. She held her hand up, thanking them. She wobbled across the yellow lines. A car passed. She zigged, then zagged, then walked straight to the other sidewalk, and stepped up onto it. I could not believe what had happened. Then she stopped, turned around.

  “Abraham,” she shouted. “Get your ass to school! Go ahead. Get! You hear me? And do your work. I don’t want to hear nothing from none of your teachers.”

  IV

  The middle of May, not yet the beginning of summer, and already it was as hot as the very pit of hell, the type of hot that makes the street steam, the type of day one can’t get out from under. In fact, it was so hot not even Lindbergh was moving. He sat beneath the lean-to he built by fastening cardboard and an old bedsheet to the fence at the baseline of the basketball court. He was shirtless and without shoes and socks on his feet, which were so dry his toes looked like crumbled concrete. He drank a sixteen-ounce can of Budweiser and ate a battered, almost rotten orange, peeling its skin with his dirty fingers and mumbling something to himself each time he spat a seed onto the court. I had on jeans because Eric took my shorts before I woke up. All day long, I played basketball with friends. We sprinted and leapt and wrestled for rebounds with our shirts off and only took breaks to laugh, argue a foul call, or speculate about Lindbergh. Who was that crazy old nigga talking to? What made him suddenly burst with laughter then cease laughing even more suddenly? What did he find so funny? Who cared?

  We were indefatigable, the type of burgeoning young men who weren’t fazed by heatstroke, dehydration, the violence and sufferings in Ever Park or the hallucinations each ailment caused. There was Tony Carter, “Kitchen” is what we called him, with a stocky build and a premature moustache and a lisp that made every word he said begin and end with an s. And bigheaded, grey-eyed, perpetually bubble gum chewing Yusef Lincoln, who never believed anything anyone ever said and shouted all declarations and hypotheses down with wild, rambling decrees that bored, exhausted, or confused you into agreeing with him. There was Jefferson Waters and his identical twin brother Cleveland, who, despite having witnessed the murder of their mother and grandmother, laughed as if they were mountains with lungs and throats of thunder. Precious Hayes was six inches taller than everyone our age and as gentle as a dove, and Ishmael Arthur, aka Titty, was forty pounds overweight, twenty pounds of which was equally divided between his breasts. Andre Grant loved to dance and would just break out dancing in the middle of a game. Leroy Madison needed glasses so bad he squinted to read his watch, and Xamir Clinton, a half-Dominican brother with skin that glowed like patent leather, was the Don Juan of brothers our age, a go-getter lover who made out with any girl, anytime, anyplace, and then made out with her sisters, her cousins, and her best friends. And there were others. And then there was me, the skinniest of us all, the quiet one with the long eyelashes and the gap between his front teeth; the one who did the homework not because I wanted to but so everyone could copy it; the one who devised master plans so we could all cheat and pass our tests, like the time I wrote the answers on a Post-It and stuck it to my back so Titty, who sat directly behind me, could get a hundred on a history exam.

  Halfway through our last game, just before the older teenagers and fully matured men gathered on the sidelines and kicked us off the court so they could play, a butterfly fluttered over the court. We acted like it was an attack. Jefferson wa
s dribbling the ball and he stopped and ducked and swatted and threw the ball at the butterfly, shouting: Get it! Kill it! Get it! Cleveland ran and leapt and tried to snatch the butterfly out of the sky. Precious pointed at it and announced: We studied that shit in school! Watch out! It’s a bat! Shit will eat a nigga alive!

  “It is not,” Yusef called out, waving his hands above his head. “It’s a butterfly! Let it be! I seen them on TV!”

  Leroy squinted. “I don’t see it. Where?” he said. “Where?”

  I stood in the middle of the court with Xamir and Titty because Titty only ran for basketball and food, Xamir was too pretty to chase and shout about a beautiful thing, and I was more a watcher, a spectator of life, than an active participant. I absorbed my surroundings. I soaked.

  The butterfly was black and orange and fazed by nothing, by no shout, no swat, and no great attempt to tear it from its flight. It flew like a plastic bag in the wind, sort of tumbling, sort of circling, sort of progressing indifferently on its way. It wandered toward Lindbergh. It stumbled down an invisible staircase. Lindbergh looked up from his orange. His battered leather-bag face became shiny and youthful. The butterfly rose and landed on the rim near where Lindbergh sat. We tiptoed across the court and stood beneath it, awed as it slowly opened and closed its wings. Lindbergh stood up, stepped out from beneath his lean-to, and joined us in watching the butterfly. He ate his orange, tearing sections from the whole, jamming them in his mouth, gumming them to pulp, and spitting the seeds out. He didn’t take his eyes off of the butterfly. He tilted his head to the side as if he were holding one ear to whispered instructions.

  “Fuck,” whispered Jefferson, his face dappled with acne and wet with sweat.

  “Damn,” added Cleveland.

  “It’s tired,” said Titty.