by Lisa Braxton
“Allah will not let the people of Petite Africa lose their homes. That is why these plans keep dragging on. It shall never happen. If they put a letter under my door or tape a sign to the building that the bulldozer is coming, I shall not believe it. Allah will stop the bulldozer.”
He wiped his hands on a dish towel and took the newspaper from her. He scanned the top of the page. “They have been making stories like this for years. The city keeps having dialogue and taking votes. I do not believe the government would put us out of our home.”
“You are a very naïve man.” She moved closer to him, almost shouting in his face. “Don’t you read what the papers are telling us? You can’t trust the government. The government has been lying about Vietnam for years. Our soldiers are dying over there every day, many of them black like us. We shouldn’t even be there.”
“You are a cynical American.” He pressed the foot lever on the trash can to lift the lid and toss in the newspaper. But the inside section slipped onto the floor. The headline at the top of the page was a follow-up story about the fire at their former apartment building. Natalie snatched the section before Omar could get it away from her. She twisted her mouth until she was smirking. “I see they still don’t know what or who caused the fire.”
“You do not need to read these things,” he said and reached for the section.
She pulled the paper away from his grasp. “Everyone has moved on and forgotten about it, but I won’t forget.” Her eyes brimmed with tears.
He made an effort to speak to her gently. “Natalie, the fire did not cause your miscarriage. The doctor told us that.”
“Maybe the doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” She balled up the newspaper and stuffed it into the trash can. Then she pulled two dinner plates from a cabinet and silverware from a drawer. Omar watched her until she left the kitchen to set the table. When he heard the plates slam onto the dinette table, he reached into the back of the cabinet over the stove. Natalie never ventured there. He pulled out a shoebox-size container and pushed aside guinea fowl feathers, horns of a pygmy goat, and a fertility statue to get to two baby-food size jars of herbs he’d bought for twenty dollars earlier in the day. He picked up one of the jars and read the label, which was made out of a thick piece of white bandaging tape. Zepis, the word for “herb” in French Creole, was scrawled in ink.
He held the jar close to his chest to muffle the scraping sound as he unscrewed the lid. As he’d been directed, he crushed herbs between his fingertips. When he thought he had enough, he sprinkled a little of it over the stew.
“What’s that?”
He flinched, nearly dropping the jar. Natalie was right behind him. He didn’t realize she had slipped back into the kitchen. She stood on tiptoes to see over his shoulders. Her breath warmed the back of his neck.
“That’s not some African voodoo spice, is it? Some mojo? Some juju?” She snickered.
He had grown tired of the jabs she made at his culture and she knew it. “My people do not do voodoo, ma chère. You are talking about the West Indians.” He screwed the lid back on the jar and set it on the counter. “It’s just a blend of herbs, that’s all.”
“Then why are you so secretive about it?”
“There are no secrets. Uncle Mustapha put these herbs together. It is a formula only he knows how to make.”
That seemed to satisfy her. She went back down the hall to finish setting the table.
Omar took a deep breath. Once he heard the clanging of silverware against the table, he unscrewed the jar again and sprinkled more of the crushed herbs onto the stew. It was a homemade love potion, a combination of rosemary, violet, myrtle flower, clove, and some secret ingredients that the seller, Hallima Santafara, wouldn’t reveal to him.
It will make your wife want to make love to you all night. She will not be able to control herself, she’d told him.
Half an hour later the stew was ready. Omar heaped a generous helping onto his wife’s plate over a bed of couscous. He looked for traces of the herbs, relieved that they had dissolved into the sauce. Hallima said the herbs had to mix thoroughly with food once it was cooked for the potion to work. Then he fixed his plate.
He missed the nights early in their relationship, when he would leave their bed to turn off the lamp across the room and in a husky voice she would say, “Hurry back.” Maybe they could recapture that tonight.
“Why did the voice coach cancel,” he asked as they sat down at the table. He always referred to him that way. Omar knew his name but wanted to keep some distance from the man.
Natalie stared at a brown water stain in the corner of the ceiling. Finally, she answered, “He had something else he had to do.”
Omar knew he was pushing her but kept going. He couldn’t stop himself. He cleared his throat. “Does that upset you?”
“Nope.” Her jaw was tight. “He rescheduled for next week.”
Omar sucked in a breath. Months ago, he had accused her of booking more coaching sessions than she needed just to spend more time with the coach. Since that night, she shared little about her sessions. Now, he watched as Natalie turned herself and her plate at a slight angle away from him. He hated when she did that. She picked at her food, pushing the outer portions of the couscous untouched by the stew onto the edges of her plate. Eventually she stood up. Omar pushed his plate aside. “We need to get out of this hellhole,” she blurted out. “I’m calling Mom and Dad. Once I tell them about these conditions, they’ll give us money to get a better place.”
Omar had always liked the Coopers: Josephine, a former Peace Corps volunteer, and her husband Walter, a Georgetown dentist. Omar got along well with the family. While in college, he spent his second Thanksgiving in the United States at their home. They didn’t object to the romance, at least not at first. But they cut off Natalie’s financial support when she got pregnant.
Omar felt ashamed that Natalie would ask her parents for money. “I shall go see Fullerton. I shall talk to him.”
Slowly, she sat back down and stared at her half empty plate. “You’d better. I will not live under these conditions anymore.”
He watched her chew the last bit of food and wondered if Hallima’s potion would work. Hallima hadn’t mentioned if the herbs could make an angry person want to make love.
“I will start the teapot,” he offered as he went to a cabinet for a bag of green tea and mint leaves.
“I don’t want any,” she snapped. “I’m going to bed.”
He quickly cleared the table and scrubbed the dinner pots. He would never tell his family that he cooked for his wife and served her plate. They would think he needed to come back home to Senegal to see the village marabout, a holy man, to get medicine for his affliction. He boiled the tea, steeped it, and then he added mint leaves. He could hear Natalie down the hall, zipping or unzipping something, then pushing hangers around in the bedroom closet and opening and shutting the bureau drawers. He hoped she was cleaning out their closet. It was so stuffed with Natalie’s garments that his clothes were pushed to the back.
He quickly dried the pots, then added sugar to the tea and poured it into tea glasses. Down the hall, he heard the whir of the fan heater.
He got to the bedroom doorway in time to see Natalie getting undressed. She had her back to him. All the lights were out except for the small lamp on the nightstand. She was naked from the waist up, crouching to step out of her pink satin panties. He took in the full view of her body. His erection pressed against his pants zipper. He didn’t know if it was the potion or happening naturally. He looked away a moment hoping to calm his lust, afraid he would burst if he didn’t. He loved her and her body, not only for pleasure, but for the promise of children to come. The doctor had told them the miscarriage shouldn’t keep them from trying for another child.
Natalie slipped her nightgown over her head. He could see her silhouette. Was
she trying to entice him? He stepped into the room and crept around the bed. He stood behind her, pressing himself against her, and placed his hands on her waist. He sniffed the back of her neck, becoming further aroused by the smell of the cocoa butter which she used daily. He lifted a long braid resting on her shoulder and fingered a cowrie shell, turning it over in his hand. He brushed his crotch up against her back and dreamed of their bodies wrapped around each other. She stiffened. Had he surprised her? He tried to turn her around to face him; she pulled in the other direction.
“No.”
“No? Why not, ma chère? What is it? What is the matter?”
She stood still a moment, then reached down and yanked one of the pillows off the bed and tugged at the sheets until they were freed from the mattress.
“Do … do you want to change the sheets?” he asked.
She turned around to face him, her eyes narrowed, and shoved the pillow and sheets into his chest. She tried to push him toward the doorway. “You go see Fullerton in the morning and get this whole thing fixed. You’re not welcome in our bed until you do.”
Omar’s erection went limp. He tossed the sheets and pillow onto the sofa bed in the living room and went back into the kitchen. He reached for his glass of tea and took a swallow. Mint tea was soothing when it was hot, but when it was cold it was painful. He spat it out in the sink.
CHAPTER 4
MALACHI REACHED for a slice of toast as Sydney reached for the ringing phone, but then ignored it. “You know that was your mother,” he said when the phone had stopped ringing. “There’s no point in putting her off. You should have talked to her and gotten it over with.”
“I know, but I don’t want to hear her reaction. I’ll call her back later.” Sydney added scrambled eggs to his plate of bacon and home fries.
Yesterday, when the couple flew into Logan Airport after their honeymoon, Kwamé was going to drop Sydney off at South Station so she could catch the train back to her hometown, Old Prescott. There she would have a few days at home before resuming law classes at nearby Whittington University. Then Kwamé and Malachi would drive on the expressway twenty miles north of Boston to Bellport. But when their plane landed, Sydney called her mother to say that she would be delaying her return to Old Prescott, and that she would be staying in Bellport with Malachi for a few days. Bernadine pressed her for the reason, but Sydney hurried her off the phone.
“She’s your mother, Syd. She’s not going away.”
“I know.”
He pushed the food around on his plate. “This is good, but more than I can eat. Why’d you fix so much? You know I only eat this much on weekends.”
Sydney put the bag of potatoes back on the pantry shelf. “You’ve got a long ride ahead of you back to campus. I don’t want you getting hungry.”
“But I’d have to be a lumberjack to eat all of this.”
She took another look at the dumbwaiter, just outside of the pantry. “How cute,” she said.
“Apparently, back in the early 1900s, there were servants here cooking the meals in the basement,” Malachi said. “They’d send food to the main floor and upstairs to the living quarters.”
She slid the panel open on the dumbwaiter and fumbled with the pulley system for a while until she figured out how to work it. “I never tried one of these before.”
Malachi picked up a slice of bacon. “Greenstein had his mother-in-law in the basement, the furniture store on the first floor, and his family up here on the second floor. I remember Greenstein telling me he’d have his wife send his mother-in-law’s food down on that thing to keep her from coming upstairs.”
“Sounds like she was a real joy to live with.” She tugged on the levers to move the cabinet down the shaft and then up again. The pulley squealed like the brakes on an old subway car.
Malachi frowned. “Oil. Put that on the list.”
Sydney jotted a note on a pad on the kitchen counter.
“Which reminds me of something else we need to take care of,” he said, “the classified ad for the basement apartment. Can you look into that?”
“Sure. I’ll call The Bellport Gazette this week.”
“And don’t forget Inner City Voice. It’s run by a brother. Max Turner. We should support him.” He scraped the crumbs from his plate into the trash can and put the plate into the sink.
“Another thing we need to do is hire Lawrence part-time,” he said. Sydney sat down across from him.
Malachi met Lawrence Briggs fifteen years ago when Malachi was his first-grade Sunday School teacher at Nehemiah Baptist Church in Liberty Hill. Raised by his grandmother in a high-crime area of Liberty Hill, Lawrence had already served time in the juvenile detention center after his arrest for car theft. Malachi talked his grandmother into enrolling him into a reformatory school. Later, Lawrence did well enough to qualify for a scholarship at Whittington University.
“You think he’s gotten himself together?”
“I do,” he said. “I want to do what I can to make sure he stays on the right path.”
Sydney thought they should wait. With a new marriage and a new business venture, why take on this new challenge? “Have you asked him if he’s interested?” she asked.
“Haven’t talked to him yet, but I’m sure he’ll want to do it. Why wouldn’t he?”
He pulled back the curtain over the kitchen sink. The sky was a gun-metal grey, thick with fog. “It’ll probably take me twice as long to get there as it normally would,” he said. “I’d better get down the road.”
With so much on his mind, Sydney hoped he would forget about hiring Lawrence.
Malachi turned back to look at her before he left the kitchen. “You know how to turn on the alarm system, right?”
“Of course. You only spent an hour going over it with me.”
“Because it’s important.”
“I know, Malachi.” She hated when his voice took on a lecturing tone.
“When you leave for lunch turn it on and when you come back, put it in the ‘ready’ position. Remember, you’ll be in here by yourself.”
“I realize that. No lecture please.”
After Sydney cleaned up the dishes she decided to take a look at the basement. They hadn’t gone down there during the walk-through yesterday. She climbed down the stairs to the main floor and undid the bolt lock to the door leading to the basement. A wall-to-wall rust-colored shag carpet covered the basement’s living room and bedroom floors. The kitchen and bathroom had green indoor/outdoor carpeting, the kind she’d seen on people’s patios. Strands of translucent glass beads separated the living room from the hall leading to the bedroom and bathroom.
She tested the burners on the stove and the oven. They worked fine. The refrigerator was larger than the one on the second floor and appeared to be relatively new. She would ask Malachi to hire some men to move the appliance to their kitchen upstairs and the old-fashioned one from upstairs into the basement.
Back in the living room she noticed a telephone sitting on an end table. Malachi was right. She might as well talk to Bernadine and get it over with. She picked up the receiver and dialed her mother’s number.
“Who gets a PhD and then decides to quit when things get difficult? I think that’s a red flag.” Bernadine had made the remarks shortly after Sydney and Malachi had gotten engaged. His application for an associate professor position had just been denied. He told Sydney he had lost hope of becoming successful in academia. He wanted her to stay in law school, but he would leave the university to purchase the Victorian, reasoning that they would be better off financially if he invested in real estate rather than trying to work his way up in academia at another institution. But he wouldn’t buy the property unless he had Sydney’s approval.
“Do you really want to start married life three hundred miles away from him? How will you concentrate on your studies? I don’t
know, Syd, it all seems too risky to me.” Her mother was afraid she’d drop out of school. Sydney assured her mother that she wouldn’t.
In Jamaica, with the wedding behind her, Sydney had had time to reflect. She realized how deeply unhappy she would be living on the other side of the state while Malachi stayed in Bellport. She wanted to be there to help him start the business. She knew it would bother her to look back and have not shared in fulfilling his dream. Sydney decided that she would take a leave of absence for a year and then decide at the end of that time whether or not to return to her studies.
The line was busy. Oh well. She’d tried.
Moments later she heard a familiar rattling noise and then the beep of a car horn. On tiptoes, she peeked out the narrow basement window. Damn! Through the fog she could make out a hazy outline of the older model dingy-blue Chevy Nova at the curb. Kwamé. She checked her watch. It was later than she realized. She hurried up the two flights of stairs to grab her purse, camera bag, and a light jacket, telling herself that she would keep lunch as brief as possible. Something about Kwamé’s manner made her feel uneasy. She would eat quickly and then tell Kwamé she needed to get home to unpack boxes. It was a convenient excuse. Lunch would be awkward enough. She saw no reason to prolong it. Kwamé was standing on the sidewalk by the car wearing a green army field jacket. He opened the door for her.
“I didn’t know you served in the military,” she remarked as he put the car in gear.
“Two years. Mekong Delta.”
“I’m surprised Malachi never mentioned it.”
“Your husband was busy working on his dissertation when I was in ’Nam,” Kwame said loudly over the rattling sound. “We didn’t talk all the time back then. My battalion saw a lot of action. That’s how I got this souvenir.” He steered with one elbow and pulled back his opposite sleeve to reveal a long, thick raised scar that ran from his Rolex watch to his elbow.
“I’m afraid to ask how you got that,” she said.
“I’ll spare you the details.”
