by Richard Dry
“Man, I know what it’s like in the South. You don’t have any idea. You don’t know. This isn’t about all of that, anyway. This is about me. I’m just going to take some art classes, and maybe a math class. I’m stepping outside of that shit.”
“All right. I hear you. I see you.” Charles nodded for a moment and stared at Easton. “You’re all tied up with Sandra still, so you can’t play on our team. That’s how you got all turned around.”
“Get out of here. Go on.”
“Sure, man,” Charles said. “You just let me know when that White ball and chain’s loose from your neck.”
“You don’t have the slightest idea, man. Sandra and I are over.”
“For real? Since when?”
“A few months.”
“How come you ain’t given me a call?”
Easton shrugged. Charles smiled and slapped him on the shoulder. “See, I tried to warn you, brother. But don’t get so down. I’m saying this is the best thing that ever happened to you. Now you’re free. Now you can come on over and hang with us at the table, be with your real brothers and sisters.”
“I told you, I’m not part of that anymore.” He looked at the White girl behind him, an algebra book in her hand. She turned away, but he spoke to her anyway.
“This man has mistaken me for a Negro. Can you please help him see that I am a college student?”
The girl laughed but didn’t look at him.
“You’re a Black college student,” Charles said. “And you won’t never be more or less. Just ask her. Isn’t that right, young lady?”
The girl’s smile disappeared. She looked to the people behind her and to the side.
Easton pushed Charles in the chest. “Why don’t you stop making trouble and try to do something useful with yourself. Get out of my breathing air. You’re polluting my space.”
“Alright. I hear you. I see you. I feel you.” Charles smiled and backed away slowly. “I am you.”
He disappeared into the mass of people milling through the yard. Easton bowed his head and felt the eyes of the other students on him. He wasn’t like Charles. He had more in common with the woman holding the math book than he had with Charles. She knew that wonderful feeling of taking an unknown quantity and working it through formulas and steps to arrive at an exact answer, to plug it back into the original problem and see it work, prove that it worked. He turned to speak to her, his friendliest smile on his face, an apology already on his lips for Charles’s behavior. But she was gone. He spotted her farther back in line behind a tall white man in a football jersey. When he tried to make eye contact with her, she turned her face behind the man’s shoulder.
* * *
THE LINE TOOK forever in the warm sun. He didn’t speak to anyone, and when he finally reached the front table, he found out that he was supposed to have filled out the forms from Information before he could register.
“Then I’ve got to wait in this whole line all over again?” he pleaded with the woman at the table.
“I’m sorry, but that’s just the process.”
“But I already waited in this line.”
“I’m not the one who makes up the rules.”
“Well, then who the hell is?” Easton swore and walked away. The people behind him were probably laughing. But he wouldn’t look. When he walked back out into the center of the courtyard, he felt his stomach rumble. He didn’t have enough money to register, buy food, and take the bus. He clenched his matriculation form tightly and then shoved it into his pocket as he stormed out of the courtyard and out onto Grove Street. His face itched. His thin beard and mustache irritated it and the sun didn’t help. He felt himself starting to explode, but all he needed was a little food. He walked toward the stores, then crossed the street to a Chinese restaurant. Two couples ate inside the narrow seating area, and the chef worked behind a long metal counter; otherwise the place was empty and a little run-down. He took a seat close to the door so that the greasy fumes wouldn’t suffocate him.
The chef put down his tongs and came up to his table. He held out a menu, but Easton didn’t take it.
“Give me some pork fried rice.”
“One seventy-five,” the man said.
“That’s fine.”
The man didn’t move. “One seventy-five,” he said again.
“You want the money now? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, please. One seventy-five.”
Love looked at the couples at the other tables, both White. “Did they have to pay first?” he said loudly.
The man looked at them and then back at Easton. “Fine. Pay later.” He went back behind the counter and scooped up a single ladle of rice onto a paper plate. He came back and dropped it on the table. He stood over Easton.
“One seventy-five.”
“Excuse me?” Easton said.
“Pay, please.”
Love turned to face the woman at the closest table. “Have you paid for your meal yet?”
The woman shook her head, and they both looked up at the chef. There were many deep lines in his face, some from age and experience, and others from the way he now clenched his brow down over his nose. He did not move.
Easton stood up, and though he towered over the man, the chef held his ground. Easton moved toward the door. Instead of complaining, the chef nodded as if he expected as much, and he brought the plate of rice back to the counter. Outside, Easton’s stomach ached with hunger and his body shook with anger.
He walked directly to the liquor store across the street and stormed up to the counter, where a White man looked at him with some fear.
“I want to get a candy bar. You want me to pay for it now, before I go get it, or can I bring it up here first?”
“You have to get the candy bar first,” he said.
Love picked a candy bar out of the box and slammed it on the table, and the man punched it up on the register. A stack of Vogue magazines lay by Easton’s fist, a picture of a girl on the cover with long, straight red hair and a very short black skirt up to the point that he couldn’t help but imagine more.
“I want this too.” Easton pulled off the top copy of the magazine and paid for both. He walked out of the store and waited at the bus stop, the image on the magazine burning in his mind. The bus was taking too long, so he began to walk the three miles back home, the cover of the magazine pulling him forward.
Twenty minutes later, the bus passed him. He walked more quickly, sweating under his suit jacket and in his boots. When he finally reached Cranston, he ran to his house. Corbet was home with Lida, and they were both in the living room—Corbet, his crutches leaning against his chair, watching the new black-and-white TV he’d just purchased, and Lida drawing with the crayons Easton had bought her for her fourth birthday.
He walked past them and up the stairs without saying a word.
“You get your classes?” Corbet yelled.
“Mmm-hmmm,” he said. Then he went into his room and closed the door. He sat at his desk, put the magazine on top, and looked at the front picture for a long time, not at the face of the girl or what mood she was in, like he did when he was drawing, but at her long, creamy legs and the hair that slid down the side of her face like shiny copper. He put one finger on the top of her thigh and caressed back and forth as he unzipped his suit pants and began to touch himself. She had small breasts poking up in the tight white turtleneck. He touched her chest with his finger and rubbed in a circle. After a while, he put his chin down onto the magazine and licked in the air above the picture, right at the edge of her skirt, right between the tops of her thighs. He looked at her face. She had a cold, distant look, but as he flicked his tongue back and forth, it seemed that the distance was really a look of intense concentration, of clenched teeth and held breath. She was trying not to move, not to give in. But she was going to lose her self-control. She was going to lose it.
Lida threw open the door. Easton straightened and pinched his legs together and yelled, “Close the door!”<
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“Look.” She held up a piece of paper with swirls of colored crayon and walked toward him.
“Get out and close the door,” he yelled again. She went back and closed it but stayed inside.
“No,” he yelled, but she ran to his desk and put her drawing on top of the magazine. Her face was level with his lap, and she saw him holding himself.
“Get out,” he snapped. “Get out and close the door.”
She didn’t move or say anything but stared at his erect penis. He pulled up his underwear and held the flaps of his pants together.
“Go on. Get out! Leave me alone already.”
But she stood frozen, like someone who had suddenly stumbled upon a murder, staring at what his hands now covered.
“What? What?” he asked.
She didn’t move.
“What are you waiting for? What are you looking at?” He opened his pants and revealed his erection. “See? Now get out.”
She still didn’t move and he gripped himself in his hands.
“Go on, now,” he said more quietly.
She stood frozen and he moved his hand, his face silent but clenched, breathing hard through his nose. He stared at her, but she watched his hand as if he were playing with a new toy. As his breathing became louder and his hand moved more quickly, she seemed about to step back, to run out of the room—to go tell everything.
But Easton reached out and grabbed her wrist. He pulled her hand to him, put it on him, and moved it up and down, her hand inside of his. Her thin arm flapped from her shoulder as he moved faster, as if it were not attached to her body. He reached to the table with his other hand, pushed her drawing to the side, and stared at the woman on the magazine, at her thighs that seemed to move farther apart with his gaze. The woman smirked ever so slightly and raised her penciled eyebrows, daring him. He pumped himself harder until her smirk became surprised, then fearful, and then he closed his eyes and imagined cumming on that beautiful, defiant White face.
He’d forgotten Lida for a moment, until she moved her fingers in the wetness. He looked down at her dark hand around his penis and let go immediately.
“I told you not to come in here,” he said. He grabbed tissues off his desk and wiped both of their hands.
“I told you to leave.” He tucked himself in.
She looked down, and tears swelled in her eyes.
“Oh God,” he sighed. “What’s wrong? I didn’t hurt you. What’s wrong?” She shrugged and looked at the table, at her drawing that he’d pushed away. There were red and yellow swirls in the corner like a sun, a brown box house at the bottom, and four black stick figures next to it.
“Is this what you’re crying about?” He pulled it back to the center of the table.
“Is this supposed to be us?” he asked her.
She nodded.
“Which one’s you?”
She put her finger on the last person. It was a little smaller than the others.
“Which one’s me?”
She put her finger on the one next to her and stood still for a minute, looking at the picture. He stared at the drawing, the peaceful swirls of colors and the smiling stick figures.
“You know why I yelled at you?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“You can’t just come into my room like that. You have to knock first. That’s why you were bad. That’s why you got in trouble. But I promise not to tell. You understand?”
She nodded.
“Now go down and draw me more pictures, and don’t forget to close the door.”
She turned and walked away, but before she opened the door, he told her to stop. “Don’t tell Ruby what happened or you’ll get in more trouble. She’ll know you were bad. She’ll come tell me.”
Lida nodded and opened the door just a bit. She squeezed through the small passage she’d made for herself, then closed the door carefully behind her.
CHAPTER 12B
DECEMBER 1977 • RUBY, 40
BY HER FORTIETH birthday, Ruby had saved only twenty-six dollars in her jar. She would have had more, but now that Easton was dead and Lida lived with Marcus, she had to pay for all the house expenses, including property taxes, rat traps, and ant poison. Then her tooth got so bad she couldn’t sleep at night, and one morning she was so tired at work she knocked over one of Mrs. Pearson’s ceramic vases and had to pay thirty dollars for that. So she went to the dentist and had the tooth pulled, for which she took forty-five dollars out of the jar. The heating bill went up in November, but she kept it low by heating up stones and putting them in her slippers and under her blankets like she used to in Carolina.
Still, the mornings were very cold, and every day it seemed harder to pull herself out of bed. She remembered then that she had dreamed about Lida. Ruby hadn’t seen her daughter for nine months, since Lida and Marcus moved in with Gina and David. Ruby had managed to push Lida out of her thoughts for those nine months, but she couldn’t do anything about her dreams. Lida, as a little girl, walked down the stairs in her yellow dress and smiled. But her feet were big, very big, like a man’s size fifteen, and as Ruby looked at those feet, they just seemed to get bigger and bigger.
“Why are your feet so big?” she asked her daughter. But Lida shrugged and smiled. “But they’re so big.” And then they were at the doctor’s office and the doctor said, “It’s a rare disease.” But then they weren’t Lida’s feet anymore, they were her own feet, and she sat on the examining table.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said to her. “We’re going to have to remove them.” And she recognized the doctor who had amputated Corbet’s foot.
“Remove my feet?” she asked. “But you can’t remove my feet.” And she yelled at the doctor that he couldn’t remove her feet. But he was going to amputate them, she could feel it, and then the dream ended.
Ruby sat up in her bed but didn’t get out from under the covers. Her slippers had cold stones in them and the windows were frosted over like a sheet of ice. She put her tongue in the space where her tooth had been and tasted the slightly metallic flavor. The wound had healed up, but it felt like there was still something under it that was sore and infected.
She put her mind on getting herself to work. She’d earn eighteen dollars and forty cents for the day. She divided her daily pay by a formula she’d worked out to make it through the year: fifty cents for transportation to and from work and another dollar for cleaning materials, two dollars for food and two for other groceries; four dollars for income taxes and two dollars and sixty cents for property taxes; one dollar for fixing the roof by June when the rain stopped, and one dollar for gas, electric, water, and telephone; forty cents a day gave her enough for a Sunday-matinee movie, and another dollar a day was enough to eat out once a week for a nice dinner, usually after the movie; she had to get new panty hose and, now that she didn’t sew, a dollar-fifty for one new piece of clothing every month, to replace either something that the moths had eaten up or something that she’d outgrown as her body settled in different places; and lastly, another dollar-fifty for the shoes she’d have to get since the ones she had were letting in water and keeping her feet cold. (She was eyeing a pair of red tasseled boots at Sears, but they would cost another extra fifty cents a day.) Every penny was spent before it was earned, except one dollar for the jar, for the trip to see her mother.
She’d thought about renting out a room in the house, taking a boarder to help with the money. But she needed to keep Lida’s room free in case she came to her senses and left Marcus. And she wasn’t ready to let out Love E’s room yet. She could not bring herself to clear off his drawings from the walls or bag up his clothes. She laughed and shook her head: the whole house was already rented out to ghosts.
She reached down and dumped the stones out of her slippers and then walked to the bathroom. The gap in her teeth made her feel old and ugly before her time. She washed her face with the lavender soap that Lida had left, and as she dried behind her ears, she remembered that sh
e would want to be at work today because Tony Pearson was coming back from his college in Boston. She had practically raised Tony since he was three, and she was as proud of him as if he were her own son. She went to the kitchen to make sure she had an extra chocolate bar to bring him, like she often had when he was younger. He would have a girlfriend now and pictures of his school and where he lived. He had written her a letter, to her home on Cranston, and Ruby had her neighbor help her read it, about college and how he had won a scholarship for his writing.
She was excited and awake now as she got ready to go. She put on a flower-patterned dress that he’d always liked. As she brushed her hair, she realized that since it was just after Christmas, she had to bring him a gift. She couldn’t give him only a candy bar, but she didn’t know what to give him now that he was grown up.
She went into the living room and wandered around, looking for something to bring him. Love E’s eight-tracks were no good, and the carved wooden animals were too fancy. She stood in the middle of the room, spinning like a merry-go-round, then stopped, looking at the stairs. She could give him some of Love E’s clothes, a jacket, but it might not fit. And Lida’s stuff was too girlish. She turned toward the kitchen and thought for a moment. She walked to the counter and pulled the jar from the cupboard above, took out ten dollars, put it in an envelope, and wrote his name across the front.
While she waited for the bus on San Pablo, she found herself smiling at the other women waiting with her. She imagined how Tony would come in the house and see her, how he would give her a big, strong hug and kiss her cheek, like he had when he left. He’d probably be dressed in a suit and tie, his hair cut short, already like a successful lawyer.
She’d never introduced him to Lida, like she’d always said she would. But she’d told him all about her as they were growing up, He’d even seen a picture of her on her sixteenth birthday and said she was pretty. But they went to different schools and didn’t know any of the same people. The closest they ever got to meeting was in seventh grade when Lida was supposed to go over and tutor him, but his parents decided to hire someone else.
