Street Shadows

by Jerald Walker

  We headed toward a strip of stores on Commercial Avenue, terrifying pedestrians and causing them to scatter. Now and then one of them cheered on our pursuers, but no one tried to stop us. And the white boys couldn’t keep up. With each block their name-calling and threats grew more distant until at last their voices faded entirely. By the time Paul and I had the nerve to glance over our shoulders, no one was there. We slowed to a walk, but once we caught our breath we started to run again. It took us over an hour to get home. We spent some of that time crying.

  Our parents were furious. They made phone calls and wrote letters, trying to get the supervisor fired and us reassigned to new job sites, all to no avail. Either we returned to South Chicago, they were told, or we lost our jobs. We did not return. By summer’s end, all of our friends who had worked the whole three months strutted around cloaked head-to-toe with the latest fashions and pockets full of money. But Paul and I were not envious of these things. We only wished we’d had better aim.

  TECHNICALITIES

  The house was an antique Colonial owned by a Republican lawyer and a stay-at-home mom. I slowly turned onto the driveway and pulled in—not too far, just enough to see a one-car garage in need of repair and, deep in the expansive backyard, two enormous boats docked for winter. I looked through the slider to my right. The mom was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at me. She waved unexpectedly, and I returned the gesture before reversing out onto the street. I wrote down the phone number listed on the FOR SALE sign and sped to our apartment, just a few blocks away. After propping Adrian in front of Sesame Street with a cup of Cheerios, I called and asked the selling price. It was a hundred thousand more than Brenda and I could afford, a mere technicality.

  We viewed it the next day. At the completion of the walkthrough, overwhelmed by the house’s elegance, we could not bring ourselves to leave, so Brenda and I lingered in the foyer to chat with our real estate agent, Ingrid, while Adrian played on the stairs. The stairs were covered with dirty beige carpet that, mentally, I had already removed. There would need to be some painting in the living room and study, and the roof and chimney were in pretty bad shape. But there were large windows with great southern exposure, high ceilings, built-in bookcases, hardwood floors, and the spacious kitchen had new cherry cabinets. We were disappointed that there was no fireplace, but Ingrid explained that when the house was built, in 1896, oil-heating systems were all the rage; to not have a fireplace was a sign of prestige. It was an interesting fact, the kind I could see myself mentioning while giving friends a tour, though I would rather be entertaining them near crackling logs of pine.

  We were discussing the asking price, which Ingrid felt was a steal. If the house was to be ours, she assured us, we must act soon. It had only been on the market for a day, just moments, perhaps, before I’d happened to drive by.

  I asked Brenda what she thought. “I don’t know,” she responded, shaking her head. “I just don’t know.”

  “I think we should make an offer right now.” I turned to Ingrid, hoping she would agree. She had shown us houses for two months and obviously knew that this was the best of the lot. She knew, too, that we could not afford it. “Don’t you think we should make an offer, Ingrid?”

  The commission she stood to make was not enough to buy her soul. “It is a beautiful house,” she said, “but maybe you should wait until you get a teaching position. I don’t want you to end up in trouble.”

  But there would not be any trouble; all the pieces were in place. We just had to convince Brenda’s mother to relocate from Chicago to help babysit Adrian and the newborn expected in June, and I had to be hired by the college. The first would be easy; Brenda’s mother was about to retire and had no ties to the area that could compete with being near her only biological child. And getting the teaching position would be even easier. Bridgewater State College was looking for someone to teach African American literature and creative writing. It was not a done deal, but I felt the position was mine to lose.

  “I’ll get the position,” I said confidently.

  “I know you will,” Brenda agreed.

  Ingrid looked at her. “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem,” Brenda replied, “is that Jerald doesn’t want it.”

  Ingrid looked at me.

  “A mere technicality,” I said.

  Later that night, after putting Adrian to bed, Brenda and I sat at the kitchen table. Before us was her hot chocolate, my cold beer, and a piece of paper with “Buy the House?” scribbled across the top. Just beneath that were “Pros” and “Cons.” We spent the next hour filling in the two columns. When we were done, there were seventeen pros, and one con. But the one con was weighty: I did not want to teach. The pact Brenda and I had made was for her to teach while I watched the children and wrote, but that was operating under the dubious assumption that one faculty salary would be sufficient for us to acquire the things we needed; an assumption made with midwestern real estate in mind and perspectives shaped by lifetimes of poverty. When we had learned that Brenda’s salary would be in the midforties, an incomprehensibly extravagant sum to us, we imagined ourselves owning a sprawling New England house, its swimming pool collecting leaves in the summer while we delighted in the sights of Rome.

  But at that moment we were sitting in a cramped apartment listening to a neighbor bang on the wall. Adrian had started to cry a short while ago, and we had let him, trying to teach him to get himself back to sleep. The older man in the adjacent unit was urging us to try a different approach. Brenda went to Adrian’s room. I called my mother.

  “The house sounds very nice,” she said. “But no fireplace?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Well, that’s okay. You don’t need a fireplace. Actually, you don’t need an antique Colonial. Can’t you find a less expensive, regular house?”

  “We’re in New England, Mom. Antique Colonials are regular houses. Besides, it’s the second least expensive house we’ve seen on the market since we’ve been here.”

  “Well,” my mom continued, “if you want to continue writing, maybe now’s not the time to buy a house.”

  “But we can barely even afford this apartment. Besides, Adrian needs a yard to play in.”

  “You mean you want a yard for Adrian to play in. You didn’t have a yard to play in when you were his age. You lived in the projects then, remember? Don’t forget where you came from.”

  But that was my problem—I could not forget where I had come from, despite spending my whole adult life trying to. Perhaps the purchase of an expensive, elegant house would trigger the amnesia I desired, blur the past enough to blunt its sharp edges. I imagined a moving truck backing toward the antique Colonial’s rear door, not to deliver things, but to take things away. “That’s a lot of stuff,” the mover would say, surveying the poverty, bad schools, jails, guns, drug addictions, gangs, and murders. I am determined, I would explain, to shield my children from all of the things you see here. My children will live in safe middle-class communities. They will travel. They will have many opportunities to explore who they are, and who they might become. They will be advantaged. “So,” the mover would say, “will you be paying for this with a check or cash?” I’d think about giving up my writing. I’ll pay for it, I’d say, with a dream.

  Brenda returned to the kitchen just as I was hanging up the phone.

  “Who was that?” she asked, taking her seat at the table.

  “My mom. I called her to say I’m applying for the position.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  She inhaled deeply, her face full of concern. “You’re not going to get much writing done teaching four classes a semester, you know, if any.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’re okay with this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She rose and hugged me. “You’re lying,” she whispered.

  A mere technicality
.

  BREAK-IN

  The house belonged to a middle-aged woman and her longtime boyfriend who drove a garbage truck. They had a daughter who was about ten, and you could already see that in a few years she’d be beautiful. I was in her room now. Above her bed were a life-sized poster of Michael Jackson and a Girl Scout certificate of achievement. I considered tearing them down but decided against it and joined Zack in the master bedroom, where he was ankle-deep in bras.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m dumping the drawers.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s what burglars do,” he said. “Protocol.”

  “Well, you’re making a mess.”

  “What are you, the goddamn maid?”

  I started dumping drawers. When a forty-five automatic fell to the floor, tangled in purple lace panties and a long strip of black ribbon, I picked it up and put it in an empty pillowcase. We dumped a few more drawers and found some jewelry, thin little necklaces as weightless as floss, which I put in the pillowcase too, and when there was nothing left to dump we went into the spare bedroom and dumped everything there.

  A few minutes later we crawled out of the basement window we’d entered and ran to 79th Street. It was cold that morning, maybe in the low fifties. We blew into our cupped hands until the bus came.

  Across from our stop, overlooking a favorite nightclub of prostitutes and ex-cons, was an apartment building on the verge of collapse. The back stairs creaked as we sprinted to the third floor, and the landing, rotted and sprinkled with cigarette butts and mouse shit, sank a little under our weight. We entered the dark hall and walked several feet, stopping at the unmarked door on the left. I knocked with an elaborate rhythm. A short while later, locks clicked, the door swung open, and Tim let us in.

  We followed him into the living room and sat on a couch that smelled like sex and sour milk. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with glossy pictures of naked women, torn from the stacks of Hustler and Playboy that lined the room like sandbags against a rising tide. There was an actual tide a block away, which I could see through the window, a stretch of Lake Michigan known as Rainbow Beach. Only four years earlier, when I was twelve, I swam in its greenish brown water, untroubled by the smell of raw sewage, or the shocked-looking trout whose dead bodies bobbed against the shore.

  “So,” Tim said, “whatcha got?”

  We showed him our stuff. “We did pretty good,” Zack bragged, “for our first break-in.”

  Tim agreed. He put the stuff back into the pillowcase and offered us ten dollars each. This was not a fair price, but being novices to the underworld and having limited connections, we took it. Zack put his share in his pocket and said he was going to visit his girlfriend. After he’d vanished into the hall I joked, enviously, that he was pussy-whipped. Tim grinned at me and asked, “Guess where I was when I first got some?”

  I hunched my shoulders. “On this couch?”

  “Gold Coast,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Back when I stole my first car.” I settled into my seat as Tim began a tale of sex and car thievery while dividing up lines of coke on the glass coffee table. A mile away, one of my honors teachers was probably taking roll, pausing to shake his head, once more, when he reached my name.

  THE INTERVIEW

  I am a strong believer in the power of protest, and so within an hour of the incident I’d already completed a draft of my letter. I’d started it by explaining that my frequent patronage of this particular restaurant was due not only to the excellent food, but also to the exemplary service. The second paragraph was spent expressing my shock at the chef’s rude insinuations, for which I was at a loss to contribute a motive, though I feared my race might have played a role. “I am a college professor,” I said in closing, “not a lowdown sushi thief.”

  I wasn’t actually a college professor, but rather in the process of trying to become one. Earlier that day I’d had my telephone interview with the English Department’s search committee. I’d felt good about the interview at the time, but that feeling lasted for only thirty minutes. By then I was convinced I’d done poorly, which meant we’d lose our house, purchased only three months ago in December on the gamble that I’d be hired. I looked across the table at Brenda, now six months’ pregnant, and shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled for the dozenth time.

  “You’re being silly.” She smiled at Adrian. “Is Daddy a silly willie?”

  “Or,” I asked him, reaching for my beer, “a loser boozer?”

  Adrian was too busy eating a wonton to decide. There was an array of Thai food before us, enough to feed an army or, hopefully, lift my spirits. An hour after the interview had ended, I ordered sixty dollars’ worth of takeout. Now, while telling Brenda some of the responses I should have given the search committee, I nibbled my way through the various cartons of food, coming to a halt when I tasted the sushi. My chopsticks fell from my hand. “The rice,” I announced, “is mushy.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s awful!”

  Adrian took a piece and ate it without concern.

  I sighed. “Can you believe this day?”

  “Try the mango curry,” Brenda said. “It’s good.”

  “First a bad interview, now bad sushi.”

  “The miso soup is good, too.”

  “What?”

  “The miso soup, it’s good.”

  I tossed my hands in the air. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  Brenda rolled her eyes. “The su-shi,” she said, “is mu-shi. I get it.”

  “But I really need it to not be mushy right now. It’s inhibiting my emotional recovery.”

  “Perhaps there’s some therapeutic value in chicken satay.” She picked one up and bit it. “Mm! And it’s tasty!”

  I rose from the table.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling the restaurant to complain.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

  The hostess did not agree. She apologized profusely and asked me to bring the mushy sushi back for a replacement. I collected the uneaten pieces and got my keys.

  I jogged through the light rain to the restaurant’s entrance, reaching it at the same time as a young man and woman. I held the door open before following them inside. The restaurant was crowded. Two-thirds of the twenty-odd tables were occupied. I scanned the room for people I knew, since many of our friends also dined there, but saw no one. I fell in line behind the young couple and eight other people. At the counter, the hostess studied her seating chart before leading a party of three to a table. She returned, greeted the next patrons, and then studied her chart some more. Behind her, the kitchen’s double doors parted and a waitress emerged balancing a tray of steaming food. I watched her head for a table to my left, where a group of six smiled with anticipatory delight. Then it hit me, that odd sensation I often get of being watched. I looked toward the kitchen doors, where I saw, framed in one of the small, oval windows, a woman’s face.

  The door behind me opened. I glanced over my shoulder as two men entered with closed umbrellas, water dripping off the tips. I turned back toward the kitchen; the woman was still there, staring at me. The hostess seated two more people; the line moved forward. Waitresses darted in and out of the kitchen, requiring the woman to move, but by the time the doors had flapped to a rest, she was back again. Five people stood in front of me. Now two. I looked at the face in the window, and then I looked behind me, where the two men had started to argue in low voices, something about a used Mercedes. They had hung their umbrellas on the coatrack.

  “Can I help you?” the hostess asked.

  I turned around. The young couple was gone. I was next in line. I approached the hostess and sat my container on the counter. “I called about this …”

  “The sushi?”

  “Yes.”

  The hostess smiled, bowing slightly. “I’ll replace it for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  S
he took the container and went toward the kitchen. The doors opened before she reached them, and the woman who had stood there emerged. The two women spoke for a few seconds in Japanese before coming to the counter.

  “I’m chef,” said the woman who had been staring at me. She took my sushi from the hostess. “What’s wrong with sushi?”

  I leaned forward and spoke quietly: “I’m afraid it’s sort of mushy. The rice.”

  “Sushi rice supposed to be mushy.”

  “I know. But this is a little too mushy.”

  “It cannot be rolled unless mushy.”

  “Right. Yes. I understand, but …”

  “You have sushi before?”

  “Of course I have. My wife and I eat here all the time.”

  “Sushi rice supposed to be mushy, but I’ll replace this once.” She carried my container into the kitchen.

  The hostess looked past me. “How many?” she asked the men. “Two?” One of the men said yes. She checked her seating chart before taking them away.

  When the chef returned, she was holding the container I’d brought, as well as a new one. She plopped mine on the counter and pointed at it. “Sushi missing,” she announced.

  For a moment I thought she had meant that they were out of sushi, that it had vanished somehow, mysteriously gone away, and then I realized what she was saying. “Oh, yes,” I said. “We ate two pieces.”

  “Why did you eat the sushi if mushy?”