by RM Johnson
I quickly grabbed my jacket and followed her, telling myself that I had to get to her before some other man did. When I got her back in my sights, she was walking across the carpeted theater lobby, heading for the glass doors. I stayed some ten feet behind her, telling myself it wasn’t just the right time yet to approach, when really I was trying to think of something to say, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t really as foolish and insecure as I felt. But I knew I had to act soon, if not that moment, because she was walking toward a beige Camry, and once she got inside her car I was doomed. If I tapped on her window, asked her to roll it down, I would’ve been better off asking for spare change to wash her windshield, than for her number.
So I swallowed my pride and walked up beside her. It took three or four steps before she acknowledged me.
“Can I help you?” she said, leaning away from me some, as she continued walking toward the car.
Calm down, Jayson, I told myself, then I said, “You like the movie?” The words came out clumsily, nothing smooth about them, or the way I said them. I sounded like a grade school student confronting the girl he’s had a crush on since the beginning of the school year.
“What?”
“The movie. Did you like it?” I said, trying to sound a little more comfortable behind the question.
“Uh, yeah,” she said, looking at me like I was crazy to ask such a thing, then looking around, as if to make sure there were witnesses just in case I tried to wrestle her to the ground and steal her panties off her, or something.
“Yeah, I liked it, now goodbye,” she said, as she kept on walking toward the car.
Was that a blow-off, I asked myself, stopping at the point she had actually blown me off. Normally, I would’ve lowered my head, shrunk about three feet, and slithered away, but I remembered all the nights at the clubs, the lonely feelings that drove me out there, and the depression I’d experience when I’d come back from not being successful. I couldn’t go through that anymore. I looked over at her as she looked for the keys to her car, and I knew, somehow I just knew that we were supposed to be together.
I started again to walk in her direction. She caught sight of me, started to fish around in her purse more frantically, but was unable to find the keys before I caught up to her. And there I stood, in front of her, my mind a total blank, unable to come up with anything more than, “So what did you like about the movie?” How lame.
When she heard that question, she was still conducting the search for the missing keys, but she stopped, her arm still elbow-deep in the purse. She looked up at me as though I’d long ago become a nuisance.
“Listen, I’m sorry. I may not have made myself clear to you, but I don’t want to talk to you. So if you’d please, just please leave me alone.” She said this looking directly into my eyes, and I looked right back into her beautiful charcoal-black eyes, and said, “Well, what was your favorite thing about it? The movie that is.” I couldn’t believe I continued with this pathetic movie Q&A, but I had no lines; I didn’t have the game all those other men had, and I really, really wanted to start a conversation with this woman, and this was the only way I knew how. This was Jayson Abrahms being persistent.
“What are you stupid? You have rocks in your head or something?” she said, tapping her index finger against her temple. “Am I wearing a sign taped to my back saying, ‘Ask me about the movie’? I don’t want to talk to you. So will you leave!” She said this, both anger and a little bit of fear on her face. She was backed up against the car, looking cornered, and that was probably how she felt, and I was sorry for that, but I just wished she knew how I was feeling.
I began to turn around, but then stopped, telling myself that I should just tell her what was on my mind. When she saw my face again, she looked like she was about to scream, but I said, holding up both palms, “Hold it. I just want to say something, and I’ll leave you alone. I promise.” She settled down, and allowed me to confess.
“I’m sorry I came at you this way. I … I don’t have any lines. I don’t know how to talk to women the way women like men to, the way other men can do. I’m no good at that, never have been,” I said, feeling ashamed, trying hard just to keep my head up, make occasional eye contact.
“I’m not going to lie, but then again, I’m sure I don’t have to, because you can probably tell. I’m a pretty sad case, chasing some woman out of a movie theater. But I’m a decent man. No, strike that. I’m a good man, with no more problems than any other, and I don’t see why I …” I blew out a long, exasperated sigh, glancing up at her just to make sure she was still there. “I just thought you were a beautiful woman, who maybe wasn’t involved with anyone since you were here by yourself. I just thought that maybe … that maybe there would’ve been a chance that …” And then I realized just how much of a complete fool I was making of myself. “I’m sorry that I ever bothered you. Forgive me,” I said, and then I turned around and walked off.
But after taking only four or five steps, I heard her voice.
“Hey, hey, wait.”
I turned around to see her walking toward me.
“What did you say your name was again?”
Since that day, Faith and I have been together. I looked down at her, sitting on my sofa, looking like she wanted nothing more than to tear my head off, and I wanted to laugh. How could she not know how much I loved her? How could she question such a thing, not realize that I felt forever grateful to her for saving me from all that crap that I was enduring. Could she not know this because I had a best friend who happened to be a woman? Could that one thing cast doubt over all the times I’d told and shown her that I loved her, all the wonderful times we had together? I mean, damn, we loved each other enough to agree to get married, and she didn’t know how much I loved her? It was ridiculous. I shook my head, giving her a sympathetic look.
Faith tightened up all her body parts even more. “What the hell are you shaking your head at?” she said.
“You. You second guessing this.”
“Me?” she said, incredulously. “We’re supposed to be getting married this weekend. In four days. Four, Jayson,” she said, holding up her fingers. She could be so damn dramatic sometimes. “And I’m putting up with this shit.”
“What shit are you talking about?”
“That bitch downstairs,” Faith spat, looking down, as if she could see Asha through the floor.
“Who, again, did you say?” I asked, letting it be known in my tone that I’d taken offense.
“Your friend … Asha.” She said her name like they were mortal enemies.
“What does she have to do with us, with our wedding, with our life together?” I said, walking closer to her.
“Everything, Jayson. She’s everywhere. You talk about her all the time.”
“Bullshit, Faith. I don’t talk about her, or see her any more than I see anyone else. And you know that if Asha was a guy you wouldn’t be making such a big deal out of this,” I said, raising my voice.
“But she’s not a guy. She’s not, and I feel threatened by her.”
“Threatened!” I threw my head back in exaggerated laughter. But when I looked back at Faith, she wasn’t laughing, wasn’t smiling. Nothing. Just dead serious.
“She’s just my friend, a pal, Faith. Give me one reason why you should feel threatened by her.”
Faith looked at me as though I didn’t have the intelligence of a soiled, crusty sweat sock.
“Well, Jayson, let me see if I can do better than that. Maybe because she’s amazingly beautiful, or that you and her used to have a relationship, or the fact that she lives right downstairs. Or, maybe I’m being paranoid, and this means absolutely nothing at all,” she said, looking up to the ceiling, scratching her head in fake bewilderment. “But the fact that I just saw her hugging and kissing you, and you two saying that you loved each other, that makes me feel a bit threatened, you know what I’m saying, Jayson!”
I just stood there, staring dumbly at Faith.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“Asha is a dear friend of mine, always will be, so I can’t do anything,” I said, starting to anger, feeling as though I was being pushed to do something I didn’t want to do. “And since you’re the one feeling threatened, not me, I shouldn’t have to do anything.”
Faith didn’t say anything to my smart remark, just sat there on the sofa, looking introspective, as if weighing her options. Then she stood up. She stood up, walked around the coffee table and past me, grabbed her purse, and headed for the door. I rushed up behind her as she grabbed the doorknob and opened the door. That’s when I knew she was serious, that something was wrong. I forced the door closed.
“What’s up? What do you think you’re doing?” I said, standing behind her.
“I think I’m leaving,” she said, not turning around, but still staring at the door.
“Leaving for the night?”
“Leaving for good,” Faith said sadly.
I turned from her, threw my hands into my hair, grabbed fistfuls of it as I paced away from her. “What the hell am I supposed to do?” I asked of both myself and her.
“I’m not supposed to feel like this,” Faith said, again into the door.
“She’s my friend,” I said, still pacing.
“I’m about to get married in four days. Four, and I should not be feeling threatened.”
“She just kissed me on the cheek. She always kisses me on the cheek.”
“I shouldn’t have to feel like this on what is supposed to be the most important day of my life. I shouldn’t have to wonder if my fiancé and his best friend are fucking or not.”
And that stopped me dead in my tracks. I rushed over to Faith, pulled her off that door. “What did you say?” I said, grabbing her by her shoulders.
She said, looking straight into my eyes, “I said that I shouldn’t have to wonder if you two are fucking or not. But you don’t even have to answer that, Jayson. You can’t answer it, because I wouldn’t know if I should believe you at this point anyway.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“Prove that there’s nothing going on.”
“Fine. Fine. Just tell me, how am I supposed to do that?”
“You go downstairs and tell her that you can’t be friends anymore,” Faith said, pointing down at the floor. “Tell her that she can still come to the wedding, but after that, it’s over.”
“Faith, you know I can’t do that, and you shouldn’t be asking me to.”
“Jayson, I know what that girl means to you. I’m not doing this to be cruel, but you have to consider how I feel. I can’t go into this situation feeling halfhearted.”
“But …” I said, trying to think of some way to reason with her.
“Bottom line, Jayson. It’s either me or her.”
“I won’t make that decision,” I said, shaking my head. “I won’t.”
Faith looked at me, sympathetically. “Then you just did. Goodbye, Jayson.”
She pulled the door open once again, and once again, I pushed it shut.
“All right,” I painfully conceded. “I’ll do it.”
4
This is wrong, I told myself as I took each step with the speed of a ninety-year-old man who had double hip replacements. This was my girl, my best friend I was going to dis, and I was desperately trying to make it right in my head in the time it took for me to reach that bottom step.
I thought about all that I would lose if I lost Asha, thought about all that we had been through. And then I remembered that day six years ago when I stood on the sidewalk outside my mother’s house. It was only half an hour drive from where I lived then, but I saw her only once every two weeks or so, and it had been more than a month since I had seen her last.
Standing outside of this house, I just stared up at it, at the chipping and peeling paint, the lawn that had been neglected for so long that it grew to waist-length in parts, the gutter along the north side of the house that had fallen, and was hanging from the roof. This was the house I had grown up in, and it was painful to see it this way. I could only look at it for so long without turning away to regain my strength before looking back. I had left so long ago, and had fooled myself, say-ing that I would never come back, that I would never see my mother again because of the way she treated me, the way she neglected me.
I remembered that porch from so many years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school, before the wood had rotted, and some of the stairs caved in. I remembered when Tonya Langly sat beside me on one of those stairs. I was crazy about her, stared at her during class, and dreamt of her at night, and I wondered why the hell she was there with me. What could she have possibly seen in me that would attract her? I continued to sit there, wanting to touch her, wanting to kiss her, but knew I wasn’t deserving, knew that I wasn’t worth her time. I couldn’t have been. I wasn’t worth my own mother’s time, and she’d made me painfully aware of that so often that her voice saying those words still rang in my head, as I stood out in front of this house as an adult. Every now and then, I would snatch a peek at Tonya as I sat with her, but I could not find actual words to say to her. We sat there in silence for what seemed like endless minutes, until she said, “I’ll talk to you later, Jayson,” pulled herself from the stairs and walked away.
She never really did talk to me after that. That hurt me more than I could’ve imagined. But what was most sad about it all, was that I got used to being dumped like that. It happened so many more times, me questioning my worth, me asking myself what these girls saw in me; they obviously started asking themselves the same question and realized they saw nothing.
Now my mother was sick, and the nurse said that her Alzheimer’s was progressing, that she would need twenty-four-hour care, and that she alone could no longer give her the care she needed.
“I really suggest you put her in a home, Mr. Abrahms,” she told me over the phone.
Me, I thought. Why should I be responsible for her? Why should I even care? I cursed my father for ever marrying her, for having me, and making her think he would be forever in our lives when he knew he wouldn’t.
I looked just like him, my mother always said. Acted the same way, said the same things, and she couldn’t look at me without seeing him. I felt her hatred of him in those narrowing eyes each time they rested on me. I always asked myself, was there hate in that look for me too? I thought I had never known the answer, but I was just fooling myself. The answer was right before me in the way she did just enough for me to keep me clean, clothed, and healthy. She never told me she loved me after he left, never held me, never kissed me, and it was for that reason that now my confidence regarding women was swimming below ground level in the sewers somewhere.
“You ready to do this, baby?” Asha said. She was standing beside me, outside the house, holding my hand, lending whatever support she could. I had brought her with me just for that reason, because I was afraid that if she wasn’t there, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far, would’ve made a U-turn just after leaving my driveway, and tried my best to just forget about my mother.
“But last time I spoke with you, you said she was doing fine,” I had told the nurse during that recent phone conversation.
“I know. She was. But Alzheimer’s can progress rapidly, Mr. Abrahms. She’s blanking in and out. Sometimes she’s herself, and sometimes she’s not responsive at all, or doesn’t know who she is, where she is. She walks around the house, hostilely breaking things. When I came in today, her hand was bleeding because she was playing with broken glass she had smashed.”
“Jayson,” and that was Asha again. She squeezed my hand, looked into my eyes to make sure I was still with her. “You okay to do this now?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I lied, and as we slowly climbed the worn, creak-ing wooden stairs, I prayed that my mother had blanked out, was in one of those spells so she wouldn’t know what was happening. Otherwise, I knew she wouldn’t let me take her out of
that house. She’d been there too long to want to leave, to allow herself to be taken.
I slid the key in the door and pushed it open.
“Elizabeth,” I called out. I had always called my mother by her name, and although I knew it was disrespectful, it was appropriate, considering she never felt much like a mother to me.
“Elizabeth,” I called out again, pulling Asha along behind me, through the old, dark, musty-smelling house. All the lights were off, and I was hit with vivid memories as I walked through the living room, passing the plastic-covered sofa and chair, the piano that no one knew how to play, and I was forbidden to even try. I passed the painted por-trait of Jesus that hung over the fireplace. I stopped in front of it, looked at the halo of light that glowed behind him. How that picture always scared me as a child.
“Elizabeth,” I called again, still examining the painting.
“Where do you think she is?” Asha asked me.
“I don’t know, but she’s here. She’s here,” I said, pulling Asha toward the kitchen. We’d started down the long hallway, when Asha stopped.
“What’s that?” Asha said, bending over and picking a sweater off the floor. It was my mother’s. And when I looked farther down the hall, there were more clothes strewn about. Then at the entrance of the kitchen we saw her suitcase sitting open, toiletries spilling out of it. It was clearly the suitcase the nurse told me she had packed for my mother, before leaving for the night.
We stepped around the clothes toward the kitchen, and there I saw my mother, sitting in a chair in the dark, her graying hair wild all about her head, her cloudy, tired eyes staring blankly into the open refrigerator. Her frail, slightly overweight body was slumped in the chair, the open fridge splashing her with light, her head falling slightly forward toward her chest.
“Elizabeth,” I called, but she didn’t answer. “Why do I have to go through this?” I said just loud enough for Asha to hear.
