Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “I love you, Emily Bird. You’re the best person I know. I love who you were, who you are, I dream of the woman you’ll be. I want you to have your shop, I want you to spend Thanksgivings laughing with your uncle, I want your mother to hate all the ways you will never be like her, because you are so much better and you don’t even know it. You’re so brave and beautiful and, God, I thought, why did I even bother to come back, she didn’t need me, I just needed her….”

  She wraps her arms around his neck, she buries a hand in that thick, well-loved hair, and she kisses him; there is no one else.

  * * *

  “Aaron,” Bird calls, “are you watching that stove? You gotta keep stirring the sauce or the eggs will cook.”

  “I’ll be there in a sec,” he says, and then that iconic, plaintive rising guitar riff blasts into the kitchen by way of the dining room speakers, and Marvin Gaye wails about how he’s going to get it on with enough force to shake the countertops.

  “Turn that down, Aaron!” Nicky shouts from the den, and they all pretend not to hear him.

  Marella, face sweaty from the effort of mashing ten pounds of potatoes by hand, does a little dance with the battered metal bowl, crooning the words in a surprisingly pretty falsetto and swinging her hips. Aaron runs back to the stove and his neglected whisk, grinning like he’s just won the Super Bowl.

  Aaron beats the whisk against the edge of the pot in perfect quarter time and matches his voice to Marella’s in an only slightly wobbly harmony. Given the lyrics this is both ridiculous and cute as hell. Coffee smiles over the cutting board, where he’s chopping several onions for inclusion in the turkey stew he calls a quasi-bobo. Bird grates cheese and watches him over her shoulder, her foot tapping the beat, her heart full and jumping in counterpoint. Her lips tingle with memory, her tongue feels too full inside her mouth, she longs for another taste of him. He catches her watching and grins and moves his elbow so it brushes hers. In the ensuing fireworks they stare at each other, Aaron and Marella belt like they’re on audition for American Idol, and Bird wonders how such a little nothing could shake her knees and spin her stomach, how one kiss could change so much. Fear crosses his face, quickly chased by a smile. He drops the last of the onions in the Dutch oven and, passing by her on his way to the sink, kisses her beneath her ear.

  “It was that inspiring, huh?” Marella says, laughing.

  Bird turns to find them both staring as Marvin finishes his exhortations to carnal pleasures, and laughs with her.

  “I knew it!” Aaron says. “Bird’s got a —”

  “Watch the sauce, kiddo,” Bird interrupts, though she can’t stop smiling any more than Coffee can. Aaron goes back to stirring the sauce and Bird grabs a few handfuls of cheese and dumps them into the liquid.

  The sauce is for the world’s best macaroni and cheese, taught to Bird by her grandmother the year before she died. And now Bird is passing it on to Aaron herself, since Nicky never bothered to learn and her mother always sniffed about how “caloric” and “old-fashioned” the recipe was. “The only thing worse was her chitlins,” Carol Bird had declared last Christmas. “Good lord, those would smell so bad she made Daddy clean them out back in his shed. I understand eating that sort of thing in the slave days, but some traditions are better off in the past.”

  Bird vaguely remembers the crunchy breading and chewy middles of her grandma’s chitlins from when she was very little, but by the time she would have been old enough to learn the recipe her mother’s protests had succeeded in removing them from the menu. No one, however, would listen to her about the mac and cheese — for that matter, Carol Bird helped herself to a big spoonful every holiday, complaining all the while.

  An hour later they have everything in the oven but the sweet potato pie. This takes longer because Marella and Bird have strongly differing opinions as to the relative virtues of lemon juice in the filling. Namely: Lemon juice, are you nuts? (Marella) and It’s perfect to round out the flavor (Bird). Coffee facilitates a compromise by suggesting that Bird zest the rind instead of squeezing the juice, and then grates a hard stick of cinnamon over top of the filled pies, a dust of brown pollen on golden-orange skin. At this point Nicky wanders into the kitchen, stretching his arms over his head and says, “Something smells damn good in here. Should I help? It’s halftime. ’Skins are down seven, but I think they can pick it up in the second half if they get that damn second-stringer out of there.”

  Bird suggests he set the table, Marella wheedles Aaron to play some later-era Michael Jackson, Coffee sighs theatrically, and then just stares as Bird and Marella dance like hell to “Blood on the Dance Floor” while stacking the dishwasher. She’s genuinely surprised when the doorbell rings, utterly unprepared with dish soap soaking the front of her shirt and sweet potato pulp drying on her collar, for the sound of her mother’s voice in the hallway: “Nicky! It’s been too long. I hope you won’t mind, Greg and I picked up a turkey from Whole Foods on the way.”

  She doesn’t realize that she’s hyperventilating until she feels Coffee’s hands on her shoulders and his voice in her ear. “Breathe. It’s four against one.”

  She gulps. Her mother’s voice is getting closer. “You can’t count Nicky. He’s never any help —”

  “Not Nicky. You.”

  She’s never counted herself for much in the fight against her mother, but maybe that’s because she has always surrendered before the battle, ceded territory rather than risk total annihilation. She feels as exposed as she always has, painfully aware of the nappy tangles of her unwashed hair even before her mother steps into the kitchen and gives them a long, purse-lipped stare. But there’s Aaron standing on a chair by the stove and Marella getting cider from the fridge and Coffee behind her, one hand brushing her collarbone before he takes a step back. When she meets her mother’s eyes, she understands for the first time how love can be a strength instead of weakness, how the web that enmeshes her among the people in this room can, if she lets it, hold her up, not tear her apart.

  “Emily,” her mother says, full of ice and disapproval. Her father, carrying a large box, looks between Bird and Coffee and forces an exhausted smile. They are different from Bird’s memory — smaller, tired, even vulnerable. She recognizes her mother’s habitual uniform of a tight bun, red lipstick, Elizabeth Arden perfume, and tasteful pantsuit, but they are a faded coat of paint on an old house that hasn’t quite forgotten past glories. Her father looks tired enough to sleep in the doorway; a tremor in his hands rattles the turkey box and then stills. It’s been just two months, but to Bird it feels like years. The people before her are old, mortal, the gods come down from their mountain and revealed to be human after all. She nearly cries for no reason she can articulate and hurries forward to take the turkey from her dad.

  She swallows in the face of his astonishment and forces a smile.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” she says. “We made a turkey, but we can heat this up when the other one is done.”

  Her mother sniffs. “Thank goodness for that. I’ve had calamari less chewy than that bird your uncle trussed up last year.”

  “Actually, Coffee made it,” Aaron says, voice tight. “It’s his special recipe from Brazil.” Bird wonders what Aaron thinks of her mother. Does he resent his Aunt Carol for her snide comments about his father? The thought jolts her; Bird has always been so concerned with her own standing in her mother’s eyes that she’s never paused to consider how other people see Carol Bird.

  “Coffee?” her mother says, though Bird knows she’s heard his name several times before. “Like the beverage?”

  Coffee’s lips tip up in that cutting smile, but he strides forward and offers his hand. “You can call me Alonso,” he says. “Bird was nice enough to invite me and Marella.”

  Her mother’s head turns sharply back toward her. “How generous of you, Emily.”

  Just like Paul, she thinks, as though there were something offensive about having the temerity to name yourself.

  Her f
ather rubs the back of his head and looks over his shoulder. “Looks like the game is starting again,” he says, and hurries away. He didn’t even touch her; didn’t even say hello. He’s just a man afraid of love, Bird thinks, and reaches for Coffee’s hand.

  Aunt Grace comes a few minutes later with a can of frozen concentrate for the punch bowl and two Tupperwares full of her famous deviled eggs. Aaron sneaks a few before Aunt Grace can shoo him away, and Bird catches herself smiling again. She checks on the collard greens, breaks up the skin on the gravy, and then her mother declares that she’s not going to wait for that silly game to finish just so she can eat her meal. The men grumble, but not too much — the ’skins are down 31–14.

  Aunt Grace’s husband, Uncle Terry, is a deacon at their church, so he says the grace while they all clasp hands around the table. To her surprise, Coffee closes his eyes, but across the table Marella raises her eyebrows. Bird shakes her head and shrugs helplessly, family, what can you do? and Marella smiles. She is overwhelmed with the understanding that she has wanted most of her life and hasn’t found until now.

  “We remember the departed, Grandpa Cornelius and Grandma May, who guided this family with strength and love and watch us still. We remember our family who are here with us in spirit, may the Lord protect them from harm and bring them safely home. We give thanks that two of our number, Carol and Greg, have finally returned to us, and that our Emily has come through her troubles happy and healthy and a testament to those who love and care for her. We pray for the strength to meet this pestilence and war with resilience and the fear of God in our hearts, and we give thanks for all richness we have as a family in these dark times. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord we give thanks, Amen.”

  The answering chorus of Amens echo around the table, Bird’s no less fervent than the rest. She wishes that Monique could be here, but with any luck the quarantine restrictions will ease with the new vaccine.

  “Time to eat!” Nicky says, taking up his plate.

  “I call a corner of the mac and cheese,” Aaron says.

  Aunt Grace pours herself some punch and tops it off with a dollop from her flask. She called it her “medicine” when Bird used to ask, which always made her and Mo laugh hysterically. Coffee’s quasi-bobo turns out to be a spicy, sweet-savory stew of turkey in coconut milk, and after a few tentative bites Aunt Grace declares it “darned interesting,” and goes for seconds. Coffee eats his mac and cheese with the relish of the converted.

  “I always just thought it was one of those weird American things, like funnel cakes.”

  “Funnel cake,” pronounces Marella over a forkful of turkey, “is divine.”

  “And that cheesy mac shit isn’t real m’n’c, anyway,” says Nicky.

  “Nicky! Watch your language at the table.”

  “Sorry, Carol.”

  Uncle Terry shakes his head. “Where are you from, son?”

  Coffee smiles as though he’s trying to keep himself from falling over with laughter. “Brazil,” he says.

  “Really?” Aunt Grace says, loud enough that she must have gotten a good start on her medicine. “We at war with you yet?”

  “Not yet, but you never know —”

  Bird coughs and elbows him in the ribs.

  Thankfully, the hush of a thoroughly enjoyed meal descends on the table, and she endures nothing more taxing than her mother’s speculative glances. It’s strange — she keeps waiting for her mother to lash out at her, to condemn the life Bird has lived in their absence, but instead of wrathful, Carol Bird looks surprisingly wary. As if she returned home expecting a caterpillar and discovered a crow.

  When Bird goes to the kitchen to take the pies out of the oven, her mother follows.

  “Well, Emily, you’re looking —”

  “I’m not talking about my hair.” Bird slams the oven door.

  Her mother winces. “I wasn’t. It … suits you better than I thought it would. I just wanted to say that I’m glad you’re looking well. The school has taken good care of you.”

  “And Nicky,” says Bird mutinously.

  “Nicky did his best, I’m sure. You’ll have to stay there for at least another week, so you know. There’s some … paperwork to take care of with getting the house back.”

  “I don’t understand how anything there could still be contagious. The quarantine is just another game of Roosevelt’s, isn’t it?”

  “Roosevelt …” It seems as though she is about to confess something, trust Bird with the truth for once in their lives, but then her eyes flick around the room and she draws her lips back into a painful smile. “They’re being very careful, that’s all. Of course it’s not contagious, but your father and I were too busy to initiate the clearance process. In any case, we should be cleared to go back home by next Friday.”

  “And what were you busy doing, Mom?” Bird asks. “Curing the v-flu? Making sure people like us got the vaccine before people like Nicky?”

  She feels her mother’s grip on her arm before she registers her movement. Long, manicured nails dig into her skin with stinging force. “Have you lost your mind?” her mother whispers fiercely. “Emily, haven’t you gone through enough? You’re our only daughter, we’ve given you everything. Don’t throw it back in our faces like this. Please.”

  The “please,” so uncharacteristic of her mother’s lectures, stops her. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, just as laughter erupts from the dining room. Her mother releases her arm and Bird rubs it, grateful for the pain because it keeps her from crying.

  “Bird?” Coffee pokes his head into the kitchen. “Did we burn the pies?”

  And Carol Bird, who has not retreated from a fight in her life, puts her head down and hurries past him, muttering something about washing up. Bird stares unblinking at the trail of her passage, until Coffee traces the marks of her mother’s nails with a long finger.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, understanding everything, like always.

  “He nearly killed me,” Bird whispers, “but they still defend him. They say they’re protecting me, but that’s just their excuse.”

  “Would you be safer if they called him out?”

  “Maybe not. But I’m so sick of being in the dark. They’ve all got this knowledge that is vital to my life, but somehow it’s never safe to tell me? Bullshit.”

  Coffee bites his lip and looks at her for long, heavy seconds. The aroma of cinnamon and sweet potato and baked pastry mingles with Coffee’s unmistakable scent and she sways like a tree in the wind, toward him and away, hoping for an embrace and not daring to give him one.

  “I love you,” he says.

  Happiness ignites a bomb in her too-full stomach. She cannot possibly contain it; she sways into his waiting arms.

  “I will never get tired of hearing you say that,” she says, her words muffled against his shirt.

  He laughs, and waits, but if she responds in kind, it is only in her hands and eyes and roving lips; she cannot say to him what she can’t even say to herself.

  * * *

  Coffee sits across from Bird on the old green papasan chair that used to belong to her grandma. Bird focuses on the spray of unraveling rattan by his knee that catches the fabric of his jeans. She doesn’t look at the quarters of lumpen chocolate sitting on a saucer on the table between them. She doesn’t watch his face, just hears his breathing. Upstairs, Aaron and Nicky sleep while she and Coffee play Eve and Adam in the basement. The first girl takes the chocolate apples in a parody of greed, sweeping the lumps into her hand and cramming them at once into her mouth. An initial wash of sugar masks the musted chalk of off-brand supermarket chocolate, but it can’t hide the taste that hits a moment later: dirt and pure bitters, collapsing to dust between her molars. She gags and Coffee takes her sticky chocolate hand.

  “Just swallow. Shrooms are too gross to chew.”

  Thus the chocolate, she thinks, forcing the gelatinous mass past her epiglottis. But it seems like a misguided attempt. All the sugar in the world co
uldn’t rehabilitate a mushroom that grows exclusively on poop.

  She takes the mug of tea still steaming on the table, letting the thickly steeped beverage wash down the remains of those misbegotten truffles.

  “Wow,” she says, her heart pounding. “I want to know who first thought that a cow poop mushroom looked good to try.”

  Coffee traces a smile on the back of her hand and surrounds it with wavy lines. They radiate up her arm, far from their point of origin, and tickle the nape of her neck. The corners of Coffee’s eyes crinkle with humor and irony and with the wonder that hasn’t left him since they kissed that afternoon.

  “Probably the person who noticed how happy the monkeys got after they ate a few.”

  Bird laughs. “Like those documentaries where all the animals on the savannah eat the fermented fruit and stagger around drunk.”

  “Sex and drugs: the universal constants of the mammalian condition.”

  “And death,” she mumbles, thinking, for no reason at all, of her mother.

  Coffee shrugs. “That’s just entropy. Even stars die, but only we can get high.”

  “Not much compared to nuclear fusion.”

  “But it’s a hell of a consolation prize for a speck of stardust.”

  She shivers and leans across the table; he cups a starry hand behind her head. “Can you feel it yet?” he asks after they kiss.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Your hand feels like its melting into the back of my head.”

  “Yes,” he says, and looks frightened again.

  “So what are we going to do? Should we have music?”

  “I thought I’d try to hypnotize you.”

  There are light-years in his eyes, concatenating gas clouds strung along webs of dark matter and a spinning, hungry pupil of a black hole at the center.

  “Does that work?” says a voice like her own. She feels a little queasy and reaches for what’s left of the tea, marveling at how she can feel at once aware of every inch of sensation between her fingertips and elbow and yet utterly disassociated from it. Like she’s a puppeteer who has inhabited her own puppet and just now recalled the strings.