by Dale Peck
“And Parker too. And Mom. Yours, I mean.”
Claudia met my gaze, then let her eyes fall to the menu in front of her. “This is so not what I want. You know what I want? Cucumber sandwiches. Two pieces of white bread, crusts removed of course, and in between a stack of wafer-thin cukes, fresh and crisp and coated in milky mayonnaise.”
“The pregnant lady has cravings,” I laughed, trying to play along. “You want those cut in quarters?”
“Triangles. Two long diagonals.” Claudia crossed her forearms in front of her chest. “X marks the spot.” When she said that her eyes darted to mine and her arms fell to the table. “Goddamn. Even food. Even imaginary food. Does everything lead back to that fucking basement?”
Just then the waitress thumped two steaming cups of cafe con leche on the table along with a basket of bread that appeared to have been ironed flat. I stuffed some in my mouth, and Claudia reached for her own slice and pulled dainty butter-shiny pieces off with her fingers and nibbled them one by one.
“So,” she said, nibbling, “Ellis,” she said, nibble, nibble, “and Parker,” and then she took a big bite. “Ellis got himself shot in the course of a drug deal, and Parker got himself shot in the course of the same deal, only he was on the other side from Ellis. This was four or five years after my mother had gone back to her people in Missouri. Can you spell Missouri?”
“Me? M-I-S-S-O-U—”
“For two years,” Claudia cut me off, “when I was twelve, thirteen, that was as far as I could go. M-I-S-S-O-U. Miss-Oh-You I do. Oh, Jamie, I’m sorry. You think I’ve held out on you all this time because I’m hiding something. But the plain truth is I’m tired of telling this story. Tired of exchanging it, for love, or compassion, or someone else’s tale of misery and woe. Whatever I am, whatever combination of flesh and synapses, it’s eternal. Unchanging. Unchangeable. I don’t mean to sound like a holy roller—I’m, like, ninety-nine percent sure you get this one go-round and after that you’re just worm food—but I know I’m more than my brothers’ death, my mother’s, thirty-two pink slips.”
“You’ve been fired from thirty-two jobs?”
“Twenty-eight. Four of them took me back.”
“Did they? I mean, each other? Did they shoot each other?”
“Nothing so glamorous.” Claudia took her hand off her stomach to reach for another slice of bread and I saw that her buttery fingers had stained the fabric of her dress, left four circles like closed portholes into S.S. Divine. “Ellis wasn’t even packing, although the damn fool should have been if he wanted anyone to believe he was a dealer. And Parker was so out of it he couldn’t have hit the broad side of a barn.” She pantomimed smoking, cheeks sucking in so hard on an imaginary crack pipe the outlines of her teeth showed through the thin flesh.
“What about your mother?”
Claudia laughed a little. “My mother did a lot of things, Jamie, but crack wasn’t one of them.” She tipped the bread basket toward her but it was empty. “Ask Daddy and he’ll tell you she died of grief for her two sons. Woman had sugar diabetes and I guess she stopped watching what she ate. Like I said, she was long gone by then, so I don’t really know. You ever read Lolita?”
“What? Um, no.”
“There’s a passage there, I guess it’s kind of famous. The narrator guy is telling you how his mother died, and all he says is ‘golf course; lightning.’ With Momma you’d have to say, ‘Cora’s Kitchen, lemon meringue pie.’” She saw the way I was looking at her and she said, “Insulin shock, boy, she had a stroke. My God, the gaps in your education.”
Then: food. Always a timely interruption. It was hard to say who forked their meal around more, covering and uncovering various parts of the enameled flag of Puerto Rico, but it was Claudia who pushed her plate away and put her face down on the wood-grain laminate of the table top.
“Fuck it. Don’t you ever want to give up?”
I put my face down close to hers, and the words that came out of my mouth surprised me as much as they did her. “Claudia, no. It’s there. Something’s there. Something’s got to be there. We’ll keep looking for it till we find it.”
She sat up heavily. “You see what I mean? I say one thing, but all you hear is The Garden. Jamie,” Claudia said, and I couldn’t tell if her voice was frustrated or simply disgusted, “I didn’t mean buried treasure. I meant life.”
I’d known exactly what she meant, and I reached for her hand. “What were you looking for, Claudia? I mean, really. We spent five months in that basement. What did you hope we would find?”
“Goddamn it, Jamie!” Claudia said, but then she stopped, and when she continued her voice had lowered. “Your mother told me a story when I was a girl, for my benefit, or maybe hers. My mother was gone, my brothers were on the way out, my father was never really there: I was ready to believe the first thing that came along. But that was years ago, Jamie. Years ago. I only told you the same story because Endean asked me to. She needed something to keep you in No. 1, to keep you from selling to Sonny, and I only said yes because I needed a place to live till baby was born.” She touched her stomach, gingerly, as if afraid to wake Divine, as if he might contradict her. “That’s it. That’s all that was going on.”
We were both quiet for a long time. Then I cleared my throat. “That’s it?”
“That’s all,” Claudia said, “that’s all she wrote.”
“Didn’t you leave out the part where you tell me your mother was white?”
Claudia frowned sharply, and I knew I’d touched a nerve. “I left out the part where I tell you my father is black too,” she snapped, but then her face relaxed again into weary sadness, and she just looked at me until I felt the color rushing to my cheeks.
“Oh, Claudia, I’m sorry. That was—”
“Racist? Probably. But my mother wasn’t the first white girl to get jungle fever. Won’t be the last either.”
Dying city, cracked city, city that dreams its citizens. City of uninterrupted interruptions was more like it. What I mean is: the door to the restaurant flew open. Its bells rang, an arrow of sunlight glanced off the pushbar. It darted straight to Claudia’s head and bounced off it in a million different directions. Claudia bowed under the heavy halo. Her back slumped, her shoulders drooped, her head fell toward her cleavage where I could see the pale traceries of stretch marks from the weight of her breasts, heavy not only with milk but with years, with grief, lost youth and lost chances. The four greasy fingerprints on her dress looked less like portholes than like holes in a bowling ball, and suddenly there was nothing I wanted to do more than grab her and get her out of there. But when I stood up and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the table, Claudia looked at it and looked at me, dumbfounded, until all at once knowledge came into her eyes.
“Oh, Jamie, no.”
She reached for my hand but I stepped back.
“If not for Endean’s sake then for mine.”
“Five months we spent in that basement. You really expect me to believe you did that so you could hide out in my mother’s apartment? You could’ve slept in one of Nellydean’s three empty bedrooms if you needed a place to stay that badly. Five months, Claudia. Five months.”
Claudia didn’t say anything else and I didn’t either. Didn’t say yes but didn’t say no either, until I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders, waved my hands, made all the signs of exasperation and indecision and incomprehension, then just said, “Come on. Let’s go home.”
But Claudia shook her head. She had picked up Sonny’s hundred-dollar bill and turned it over and over in her fingers.
“I have some stuff to do up here.”
I waited again, as if she might finally tell me everything, but all she did was sit there with the hundred-dollar bill in her hand. As I walked past her, though, she reached for my arm again, and this time I let her catch it. She held up her cheek and, dutifully, I bent to kiss her. Her flesh against my lips was so hot it scalded them, and it was salty too, and what did it smell like
? It smelled like lead. What else could I do?
“Keep the change,” I said, and I fled.
FOR A FEW HOURS this afternoon the world has grown as large as the menu in front of her, a vista of almost ridiculously elaborated possibility and variation: eggs, any style; with ham, bacon, or chorizo; potatoes (hashbrowns or fries, substitute platanos fifty cents extra); juice (orange, apple, grapefruit, cranberry, or piña); and choice of bread (please for today’s selection); don’t forget tea or coffee (cappuccino no extra charge), and who can keep track of the number and kind of condiments, the things that can be sprinkled or smeared or poured on top of such bounty—all that, and jalapeños too! But when I walked out of the restaurant everything became as small as the three quarters and one nickel lost in the folds of her purse, and now, as she studies the single wrinkled bill on the table, she says, “Damn you, Jamie,” pretending she’s angry at the blank-faced boy who’s left her alone. But the truth is she’s mad at herself, for not being able to come up with a story more compelling than the one in my head, and when she gets up she leaves Sonny’s money on the table. Some things just aren’t worth it.
“Guess he wasn’t hungry. No tengo hambre,” she says to the waitress, not sure if she’s saying she doesn’t have hunger or if she doesn’t have a man. Without thinking, she puts a hand on her stomach as she makes her way through the tightly knit tables, and for the first time in weeks she’s shocked by the heft of it, the incredible multiplication of cells inside her body, and then she feels Divine turn—in his sleep, she wonders, or is he awake and playing at some prebirth game? The movement under her fingers stops her in her tracks, this rumble so near and yet so far from appetite, but then she rights herself and smiles at the waitress again, who is looking at Claudia as though she’s just another floozy who cadged a free meal, and Claudia has half a mind to go back for the Benjamin. Outside, the contrast between the sun’s brightness and winter’s coldness is a little more than she can deal with, and she curses Reggie for cooking up in front of her last night. She shields her eyes from the glare with one hand, puts the other on the small of her back. She imagines she’s ratcheting her overloaded torso up to full vertical. Onward girl, she says to herself, and sets off—which way? Her old home, or her new one? She wavers between north and south, uptown and downtown, then eschews both and simply crosses to the west side of the street, and as she makes her way across Broadway’s double width she notices the orange cast of the sinking rays and thinks, Good God. Another day gone. By the time she’s made it across the street she’s forgotten her earlier indecision and without thinking turns uptown. She’s gone two blocks before she realizes which way she’s headed, and with a sinking heart thinks of how easy it had been to wake up in her own bed that morning, her old bed, how natural it felt to have Reggie beside her. No, she doesn’t live at home anymore. But home still lives in her.
The walk back is different without me. Returned to its normal state. The massive blocks that make up the lower facade of Columbia’s buildings pen in the street like a Roman aqueduct and sluice her toward her destination. She’ll go home is what she’s thinking, fuck Dad, and fuck Jamie too. All she wants is to get out of this tourniquet of a dress and those goddamned ridiculous shoes (she thinks of them as those shoes because her feet are so far away now, on the other side of the mountain range her stomach has become: not these shoes on my feet, but those shoes, on that other woman’s, on the other side of that hill). Only a few more weeks is what she’s thinking—unless she’s miscalculated—then, God willing, she and Divine will leave everything behind: not just me and Nellydean and No. 1 and the treasure we never found because it never existed, but New York Fucking City. K. had the right idea is what I imagine she was thinking, clean air, clean living—and just then a leering voice drags her back to the cold sidewalk and her empty purse and not-so-empty stomach.
“Nice ass.”
She turns—for good or ill she’s long since reconciled herself to the fact that she is the kind of girl who always turns—and she’s sorting through her list of standard rejoinders when the face she sees wipes all those glib words from her brain.
“Rolando!”
He stands there in a frame that could have been composed for a slick little video: leaned in his shiny black suit up against a Lexus SUV the size of a small tank, silver body, gold logos on grille and wheels. To his left the brutal snout of a fire hydrant pokes from the sidewalk; to his right one of his homies, a skinny boy whose face is completely hidden by his parka’s fur-lined hood, shouts obscenities into his cell phone, though it’s unclear if he’s threatening someone or merely practicing his rhymes. Rolando’s own lack of an overcoat comes across as further proof of his prosperity: he’s not going to be out in the cold long enough to need one. Now, when he smiles, a flint of gold at the corner of his mouth matches the accents on his truck, and despite herself—despite her long wool overcoat and swollen stomach and the quack-quack duck slap her feet make as she shuffles toward him—Claudia finds herself silkening her voice to reply,
“Hey, baby. How you doin’?”
She walks toward him slowly. Not warily, and not sluggishly either. Just slowly, letting him take a good long look, which he does, and to his credit he says, “Girl, you are looking too fine.”
“Go on with yourself. You know that shit don’t get you nowhere with me.”
“I can’t believe your man lets you walk the street alone. If I was your man—”
“But you ain’t.” She looks at the inch-wide gold band clipped to the bottom of Rolando’s left ear, the little shield covering up the earlobe that got sliced off in his early reckless days of street dealing. Rolando looks right back at her, his eyes focused who knows where, who knows when, and then he breaks into laughter.
“Girl, look at you. You gonna pop any day now.” He leans forward and kisses her on the cheek, and Claudia thinks, Sonofabitch never kissed me on the cheek before. “How the hell are you, girl? I ain’t seen you in forever.”
Claudia takes a little step back. “I’m as good as I look,” she says, turning this way, that.
Rolando’s smile goes rigid until he aw-shucks it away. “Well you look as good as ever. I mean that girl, I really do.”
Claudia smiles, confident decorum will be preserved, face saved, and if Rolando sees the little quiver in her lips it doesn’t show on his. She puts her left hand on his lapel, soft as an infant’s cheek. “And how’re you, baby? Business”—she smirks a little—“seems to be treating you well.”
There is room for a more barbed comment. All she has to do is mention Parker’s name, or Ellis’s, but she’s had enough of that, with me, and she decides not to go there.
“I ain’t complaining.” He looks down at her hand on his chest, and she remembers that just beneath this iridescent silk there’s a hole in Rolando’s skin. Not a hole, of course. Not now. A scar. A note, she thinks, because she didn’t just read Nabokov in school. A whole note. But she remembers when it was fresh and gaping, and she snaps her hand away.
But Rolando catches it in both of his as if to tell her it’s okay. “How’s Reggie? Nigger ain’t shown his face in a dog’s age.”
“That’s cause he’s in the dog house.” Claudia puts her free hand on her stomach and they both laugh. “You know how it is. He’s hanging. Hanging and sanging.” She drawls the word out and they both laugh again. By now the heat of Lando’s hands has warmed up Claudia’s and she’s lost in that feeling, remembering when men still wanted to warm her up when she was cold.
Lando squeezes tighter. “Still sound like a ten-year-old girl?”
“Twelve.” Claudia squeezes back. “He hit puberty.”
They laugh again, easily, and Claudia pulls her hand away, thinking it time to put history back on the shelf, but when Rolando lets go she feels something left behind, and she has to resist the urge to look at it. It’s not like she doesn’t already knows what it is.
“Well, you say hi-lo to that nigger for me. Tell him I’ll buy a hun
dred copies of his first CD if he ever puts one out. Yo, String Bean!” he yells. “Get your fat ass in the car. We’ll fix this kid later.” He looks down at Claudia. “You didn’t hear that.”
“No comprendo. No inglés. Pero mira, señor, estas muy guapo. ¡Ay, caliente!”
“You too much, girl, you always was. You take care-a yourself.”
He reaches for the handle of his truck, which is also gold, like the logos on the wheels and grille, like the rings on his fingers and the band on his ear and the plate in his mouth. Lando. Golden boy. Who’d-a thunk it?
It’s too fucking cold for this, she thinks then, heading for home, but even as she thinks that she reflects on the fact that it’s been one of the mildest winters on record. In her pocket her hand is curled around the glassine. She rubs it between thumb and forefinger, feels the slickness of the plastic, the uneven consistency of the stuff inside. Proust had his madeleines, she’s thinking, and what the fuck do I get? Horse. Goddamn him, she thinks, and she doesn’t mean Proust (and no, she didn’t read the whole thing: did you?). She means Parker. Goddamn both of them, she thinks, reminding herself not to take sides. Parker and Ellis. Taking sides was what got them into trouble in the first place. Maybe, she’s thinking, that’s what I should have told Jamie. I should have told Jamie that the trouble really began when people started taking them for twins. That must’ve happened when they were four or five, at any rate before I was old enough to remember. Fine for Ellis—he was the younger, eleven months behind Parker—but for Parker it was the first sign he wasn’t developing as fast as he should have, at any rate not as fast as Dad would have liked him to. There’s a lot of pressure put on the oldest child, especially when he’s a boy and especially when he’s black. From an early age Parker knew everyone expected him to be perfect, straight A’s, star athlete, church on Sundays, the prettiest girlfriends. And I suppose Dad did have high hopes for him but he had high hopes for all of us. Dad marched with the Reverend. He believed honest work and clean living could make things better for the American Negro, and looking at him, at his life and what he accomplished, I guess you could say it worked. He started out as an elevator boy on the Upper West Side and after fifty years of yessirs and nomes and sixty-hour work weeks he’d dragged himself all the way up the ladder to the middle, by which I mean he was head doorman emeritus at a Central Park West co-op building and he had his own twelve-room apartment on Frederick Douglas Boulevard to show for it. Of course by that time he’d lost both of his sons and his wife and, for all intents and purposes, his daughter, but he still had his rent-controlled lease and God save the fool who thought he could take that away from him too.
