Chapter 2
The morning after drowning the news of Zola’s pending Bali wedding in the murky brown liquid of so many shots of reposado tequila she could hardly leave Margarita Town on her feet, Zena awoke to a spinning headache that released her from her morning run. She rolled over in the bed, turning her back to the bedroom window where the late-morning sun was beaming into the room. She was too tired to be fully awake and ready to enter a new day after tossing around in bed through the twilight hours, endlessly replaying worries she had no control over. Problems she’d trained herself to forget, to get away from, but now, there they were right in front of her. While her nighttime thoughts began with Zola, the prickling concern beneath her sister’s future was Zena’s own past.
Malak’s psychic ability—or good sense—had struck gold again at Margarita Town when she boldly shared that maybe much of Zena’s consternation about Alton and Zola getting married wasn’t about them finding love. It was about the love Zena had lost and never forgotten.
Zola wasn’t the only sister to fall in love with a boy who lived up the street. She actually wasn’t even the first.
Lying in bed that night, Zena’s thoughts went back—way back to the time she was a teenager and met Adan Frederick Douglass. He was the first boy to steal her heart away. He was the first man to tear her heart into tiny smithereens. She’d spent too much of her life and good money in therapy trying to pull the pieces back together.
It all started with her parents’ ruined marriage and a popped bicycle chain.
After her father’s second affair with one of the cashiers at the Sutphin Boulevard Burger King where he was a manager, Zena’s mother paid a few hundred to a pimply-faced attorney who promised “quick” divorces in advertisements on subway cars. The couple had no money, property or belongings to split up. Her mother knew there was no way her husband would petition the courts for custody or shared visitation rights for Zena and Zola, fifteen and nine at the time—he had limited funds and no place for his daughters to stay. Zena overheard her mother telling their neighbor who worked on Jamaica Avenue that she just wanted the marriage to be over and to get her girls out of Queens.
Hearing this hurt Zena beyond repair. While her parents’ marriage was mostly rocky, as her father was unreliable and could never keep a long-term job to support them and often stepped out on her mother, Zena loved her father and just wished he’d do right. During their father-daughter walks around the neighborhood, he’d often promise just that. He explained that he didn’t mean to hurt her mother and said something about New York’s poor public school system that diagnosed his dyslexia too late. His reasoning became scrambled into a massive puzzle in Zena’s head. All she wanted to hear about was how her parents and her family could stay together. But he had no solutions. No plans. “I’m broken, babygirl. I done failed ya’ll,” he’d said.
A week later, Zena was standing in a Greyhound bus line with her mother and sister at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. Everything they owned amounted to five boxes being slid into the cargo hold of a bus en route to Atlanta, Georgia. Speaking as if she was a grown woman who’d lived a life and had the necessary scars on her soul one would need to give another grown woman advice, Zena said in her gruff Jamaica, Queens-girl accent, “You didn’t even give him a chance. He was trying and you didn’t give him a chance. And I resent you for that.” Zena thought she’d really said something. Standing in line at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, she crossed her slender teenage arms over her chest and awaited a defense she felt was impossible.
“Mothers don’t have time to give people chances. You’re my top priority. Not him. Not even me. I did this to save you and your sister from growing up and being stuck in a hole like me and your daddy. I did this so you could be happy,” her mother said.
“Happy? In Georgia?” Zena laughed the way any Queens-born girl who’d been torn from her home to live in Georgia would. “You’re making us move from our friends and school. We’re losing everything, Mommy.”
Zena’s mother paused and responded with unmistakable passion in her voice. “You may feel like that now, but I’m giving you a real opportunity to have a better life.”
* * *
Zena’s bicycle chain had popped the morning she met Adan. Her mother had just gotten the rickety red ten-speed from the Salvation Army and unloaded it from the back of the dented 4Runner some cross-eyed deacon at their new church let her mother borrow. Zena was complaining about being locked up all day in the house looking after Zola and begged for a bicycle. While she’d complained about cobwebs on the frame and the cracking fake-leather seat when they spotted the ten-speed in the back of the secondhand store, once Zena got the thing home and kicked off from the curb, she tasted the kind of freedom every fifteen-year-old knew while riding a bicycle.
At first, she heeded her mother’s instructions and only rode around the corner a few times, but then she became curious about her new surroundings and rode faster, standing up on the pedals as she pushed two and three miles from her front door. The houses got bigger and the cars nicer as she sped along. She noticed that the house she lived in with her mother and her sister was the smallest one in the entire neighborhood. She’d heard her mother mention on the phone to her grandmother that she’d gotten the rental for a quarter of the price through some pilot fair-housing project that would later be known as “Section 8 housing.”
It was late summer, and the Georgia heat kept most people indoors, but she saw some stray gaggles of teenagers entering cars and front doors and wondered if any of them would be her classmates when she started classes at her new high school in a few weeks. Walking up flower-lined driveways in bright colors and smiling, they all looked so solidly middle-class, so happy, so far away from the armor-clad, stone-faced friends she knew back in the New York projects. Right then, Zena decided that she wasn’t going to tell anyone at her new school that she lived in the smallest house in the neighborhood.
Soon, droplets of warm sweat escaped Zena’s underarms and wet her T-shirt. The precipitation seemed to descend on her brow and draw every ounce of energy from her body. Zena, going on pure zeal, continued her tour, but she was panting like a thirsty dog and she began feeling as if she’d been away from home for hours, though it had only been twenty minutes since her departure. This was her official introduction to the stifling Georgia humidity that suffocated everything that had the nerve to move before 7 p.m. in late July. Zena would never forget that feeling, that day; it was as if she’d fallen asleep in a sauna and awoke in a pool of her own sweat.
Growing concerned after considering her wet knuckles and steamy scalp, Zena decided to head home, fearing her mother must be panicked because she’d been gone so long.
She’d been resting her bottom on the prickly cracked bicycle seat but decided to get up and floor it home.
When she rounded the curb onto her new street, catching a breeze that did little to cool her off, Zena noticed a family getting out of their car in the driveway on the side of a house that looked identical to the one she lived in just seven houses down. It was a mother and father with two boys. One of the boys looked her age. The other couldn’t be much older than Zola.
While Zena was two houses away, the family stopped and looked at her as if she was an alien pushing a ten-speed up the street.
Zena’s delicate fifteen-year-old self-esteem made her wonder if she was doing something wrong. Could they see the sweat stains at her underarms? Had the wind swept her hair all over her head and she looked like a parading Medusa? What were they looking at?
The little boy started waving, but Zena was too afraid to wave back, fearing she’d lose control of her bike and crash into one of the cars parked on the street. Instead, her bubbling anxiety under their watching eyes made her want to simply disappear, so Zena decided to race home, where she’d run into the house and never ever emerge again.
&nbs
p; That was when the chain popped.
The pedal push that was supposed to send her somewhere quickly actually split the chain. There was a click and then the bike simply stopped moving. Zena’s insistence on continuing her pedaling sent her and the bike, rather quickly and very dramatically, to the hot tar pavement, where she really hoped she would die.
“Lord, she done fainted,” Zena heard a man’s voice say, so she knew she hadn’t actually died, which was a letdown.
“No, she didn’t. I think she just fell,” she heard a woman’s voice say, and she knew it was the mother, who’d been standing by the car, because as she looked up from the ground, she could see the woman’s coral espadrilles rushing toward her.
Soon, the family of four was gathered around Zena as if she was a fallen angel. Worry was on everyone’s face. Everyone but the boy who looked her age. He was smiling. Almost laughing at the sight.
Zena was quiet, quieter than she’d ever been in life. She watched as the four fussed over her, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The father discovered that it was the broken chain that sent her tumbling to the ground, but he kept saying something about the heat and that it was too hot for anyone to be riding a bicycle at 3 p.m. And didn’t she know that? The mother tried to quiet him after sending the little boy into the house for water.
She asked, “Where are your parents, honey? You live around here?” Her voice was Southern sweet. She sounded as if she could get anything from anyone. Zena had never heard a woman sound quite like that. It made her instantly like the woman.
Zena was listening but not speaking so the mother made the father check for broken bones. He found none and announced that Zena was just in shock. Just afraid because she’d fallen from her bike and here they were hawking over her like police officers. The couple laughed in unison at their hovering in a way that Zena had never heard her parents connect. It was as if they were suddenly alone and had heard lines in a conversation no one else could hear. Then the father kissed the mother. He said, “That’s the nurse in my baby. Always worried about somebody.” They kissed again and giggled.
The boy who was about Zena’s age, the one who’d been ready to laugh at her fall, was frowning then and rolling his eyes at his parents as if he’d seen this all before and it was making him sick. He turned to Zena and pointed his index finger into his open mouth toward his tonsils as if he was about to make himself vomit.
The little comical gesture introduced Zena to the saying, “I have butterflies in my stomach,” because some new feeling was literally tickling her insides, from her navel to her throat. At that very moment, the tough girl from Queens awakened into feelings she’d never known. It was as if those little butterflies fluttered their delicate wings at her insides all at once and sent some mellifluous whispers of what she’d later recognize as first love straight to her heart. She’d never even thought of looking at a boy the way she did at that moment. She wanted to know everything about him. To smell him. To touch his curly black hair. Kiss those full lips. And if she’d ever heard the word imbibe, she’d want that—to imbibe him. Drink him in. Soak him up. Absorb him so she could feel what she was feeling in her stomach again and again. But that would come later. Junior year in high school. In someone’s basement after a football game. Right then, she just wanted to know one thing—his name.
And without Zena even asking, he acquiesced.
“I’m Adan,” he said, struggling so hard to make his pubescent voice sound masculine as his parents came out of their love bubble and noticed the teenagers’ quick connection.
“I’m Zena,” was returned.
“She speaks,” the father said, looking at the mother with a kind of adult knowing in his voice.
“Good to hear, honey,” the mother said. “We’re the Douglasses. You’ve met Adan already. This is Mr. Roy.” She pointed to the father and then to herself. “I’m Mrs. Pam. And that little hellion who never came out with the water is Adan’s little brother, Alton. He’s probably playing his Nintendo game.”
After helping Zena to her feet and carrying her bicycle to the sidewalk as she reluctantly revealed that she lived up the street and had just moved to Georgia from New York with her mother and sister, Roy abruptly excused himself and his wife. Attempting to pull Pam toward the house, he winked at Adan and ordered him to fix the chain with the supplies in the garage. Pam ignored Roy’s clear desire that Adan and Zena get better acquainted and asked about Zena’s mother again. She wanted to make sure Zena got home okay.
“The girl just told you she lives up the street. I think they’re renting the Jefferson’s old house. That ain’t far. She’ll be fine, Pam!” Roy protested. “Let these young folks figure it out. Everything will work out fine.” He winked at Adan again and pulled his wife up the walkway and into the house.
“They’re so weird. Weird and embarrassing,” Adan said when they were gone, and with every word he spoke, Zena felt those wondrous flutters all through her body again.
“My parents are divorced,” Zena announced as if she’d been holding it in her stomach all that time and needed to let someone know. “My dad cheated. He’s having a baby.”
Adan hardly reacted. He just shrugged in his learned teenage boy way. Zena would soon recognize this as his cool routine. “My mom would kill my dad if he cheated. She told him that one night. I think he believes her.”
Adan picked up the bicycle and began rolling it toward the garage.
Zena followed close behind, watching him walk, spying his muscular arms and calves. She kept thinking that he had to be the cutest boy she’d ever seen. But, then, she couldn’t remember ever really seeing any other boys. Memories of the ones who’d chased her around her neighborhood in Queens had faded so quickly. Who were they? What were their names again?
“Your chain is mad rusty. Where’d you get this bike? The Salvation Army?” he asked jokingly once they were in the garage and out of the hot sun.
“Yes,” Zena admitted, embarrassed, and then she wished she hadn’t fessed up to it. She didn’t want Adan to know she was poor. Then he wouldn’t like her. Could he like her? Did he? Zena looked into Adan’s eyes for signs of something. Anything.
“Really?” Adan seemed surprised by the news and the obvious fumble of his joke about the Salvation Army. His light brown cheeks turned ruddy, and suddenly Zena saw in his eyes reflections of the same feelings she felt in her stomach. He liked her. Maybe he did. She felt her own cheeks turning red then.
“That’s cool anyway. The bike is a little rusty. It could use some cleaning. But it’s a nice bike. A Huffy,” Adan said, suddenly cutting his gaze away from Zena as if he was becoming more nervous.
“You think it’s nice?”
“Yes. It is. I could help you fix it up if you like. We could spray paint it. Make it dope.” Adan looked back at Zena and smiled.
Zena smiled back. She felt as if she’d been asked out on her first date. “That would be cool,” she said.
“We could set it up here in the garage. Work on it. Like a project.”
Zena had never heard a boy her age use that word before—project.
She nodded and helped Adan flip the bike over. Standing beside him, she didn’t want to breathe. She didn’t want a second more to pass. She wanted everything to stop so she could just be right there, right then with him. She was afraid she’d miss something. Forget something about that moment. But she never would.
He turned on an old, dusty radio that his father listened to sometimes when he worked on his car in the garage. Some Goodie Mob song was playing, and Zena revealed that she’d never heard of the group. Adan’s eyes widened. He didn’t believe her. He then went through the entire history of the Dungeon Family, a local rap consortium that Adan heralded as the best MCs in the world. Zena laughed and pointed out that the best MCs were Biggie, Nas and Jay Z. This debate would continue throughout thei
r relationship. But at that moment, Adan controlled the dial on the radio, so he turned up Goodie Mob’s “Black Ice.” Loud and proud, he rapped along about waking up and touching the sky.
Zena watched, listened and laughed. Soon, just as she’d done with the boys back in NYC, she forgot all about the time. The sun went down and her mother came looking for her.
* * *
It took Adan three long, hot weeks to make Zena’s old rusty bike the envy of the street. With his father’s help, he spray painted the Huffy hot pink and electric blue, reupholstered the seat with purple fabric and Pam even added a bell that Zena’s mother insisted on paying for. As the repairs went on and the summer came to a close, Zena learned more about the Douglasses and everything about Adan. He was so smart. He seemed so much older than her. Sometimes he reminded her of Mr. Roy in the way he was always joking and pretending he was keen on a secret. He was cool, too. Seldom overexcited or sad. He seemed to have feelings right down the middle at all times. He took care of his little brother. Listened to his mother. Followed his father’s direction. This all comforted Zena. Made her open up to Adan about everything that had her out pedaling fast on that old red bike that day. Over those afternoons in the garage she told him all about her parents’ divorce. Her empty feelings. Her fear. He always seemed to know just what to say. Just when to be silent. Just when to reach out to wipe her tears.
One evening, Zena’s mother had to work a double shift at the airport, where she’d lucked up on a job at Delta Air Lines. Zena was stuck in the house taking care of Zola, though she’d promised Adan she’d meet him at the local roller-skating rink. She was too embarrassed to call his house to say why she couldn’t go, so she decided to just let the moment pass and later lie and say she forgot. While this line of thinking sounded crazy to her now, back then, it was a perfectly rational decision made out of shame and humiliation that her family had such limited funds that she was basically her sister’s primary caretaker while her mother plated flight meals at the airport. Zena had been spending so much time at the Douglasses, and she now envied the ease and reliability of Mr. Roy and Mrs. Pam’s stable marriage and home. Adan never had to take care of Alton. There was always someone at home to look after them.
Under the Bali Moon Page 3
