“Would you like to see my apartment first?” she asked.
As neat and clean as she was dressed, I assumed her house was the same way. Her fingernails were clean, and I didn’t want to insult her just because she lived in the projects, so I said, “Maybe we’ll stop by in a day or so to meet the rest of the family,” which is what we did. And I was right. Her husband was just as friendly; they’d been married for twenty-one years, and all their daughters—who almost fought over which of them was going to hold and play with Jeremiah—were just as good-natured as their parents.
Franklin was hopping around the house in his cast when we got back. He’d been getting around pretty good, and had left before we had this morning to check on getting his workman’s compensation. He was going to have to wear this cast for six weeks.
“I found a wonderful baby-sitter,” I said.
“That’s good. How much?”
“Fifty a week.”
“Damn. That’s two hundred a month, ain’t it?”
“She’s cheap, Franklin. Most day cares cost more than that.”
Then he turned to Jeremiah. “Come here, you little crumb-snatcher.”
Nothing made me happier than to see him playing with his son.
* * *
My first morning going back to work was weird. I was up at the crack of dawn, getting all Jeremiah’s stuff packed in the diaper bag. I must’ve packed at least fifteen Pampers, six bottles of formula, baby wipes, rattles, two bottles of juice, three or four changes of clothes in case he spit up too badly—too much of everything. I was out the door by seven, and the poor thing was still asleep when I put on his snowsuit. Then I wrapped I don’t know how many blankets around him. You could hardly see him as I pushed him in the stroller.
“My goodness, Zora, where is the baby?” Mary asked, then started laughing.
“Do I have too much on him, you think?”
“Chile, babies don’t get no colder than we do. Don’t worry about it, though. I can see you new at this.”
“You’re right. But, Mary, would you promise me one thing?”
“What’s that?”
“That you take him for a little walk every day, or at least get some fresh air?”
“Chile, whenever the weather is good, we sit out on the bench all day. I can’t stand being all cooped up here myself. Now you go on and have a good day.”
By the time I got on the subway, I had this overwhelming feeling of emptiness and guilt, like I’d just abandoned my baby. I’d only known him less than four months, and I had already handed him over to somebody else. I looked around the train at all the other women and wondered how many of them had left their babies like I’d just done. How many of them had felt like this? Was I just being silly? And I wondered even more, as I looked at them reading their romance novels or New York Times, whether they were going to work because they wanted to or because they had to. I started crying and couldn’t stop. I wished there was a way I could’ve stayed home with him for his first year—just to get to know him, watch him take his first step. I just prayed that I wouldn’t miss out on that.
* * *
School was the same. Everyone was glad to see me.
“Miss Banks, we heard you had a baby boy. Is he as good-looking as you are?” someone said. I couldn’t catch the voice, but I thought it might have been Luke, who the kids swore had a crush on me.
“Can he sing as good as you?” Maria asked.
I just laughed.
“What’s it like being married?” Corinthia asked, leaning forward on her elbows.
I wanted to say, “I wish I knew,” but instead I said, “It’s great. Just great.”
The day was uneventful. I wanted to call Mary on my lunch hour to ask if everything was going well, but I didn’t want to get fanatic about this. After my last class, I had so much paperwork to attend to I couldn’t get away until almost four-thirty. Normally, I’d be out of here by three forty-five. I couldn’t wait to get to Mary’s, and when I did, Jeremiah was sitting on one of her daughters’ lap. She was ten.
“Hi, Miss Zora.”
“Hi.”
“Everything went just fine, Zora,” Mary said. “He’s such a good baby. The only time he cry is when he wet or hungry, huh?”
“I think so.”
I started packing him up, and then Mary said, “Why don’t you leave them bottles in the ’frigerator. You got enough to last a couple days, don’t you thank?” She started laughing. “Y’all new mothers kill me. And you know what: If you wanna bring a box of Pampers and just leave ’em here, and a few clothes, it’ll save you from lugging all that stuff in the morning.”
I told her that was a very good idea, and it’s what I did from then on.
* * *
Franklin hadn’t heard a word about his workman’s compensation, but he was getting around real well. And he had gained a few more pounds doing nothing but lying around the house all day. So this is what I asked him: “Would you mind picking Jeremiah up in the afternoons, since I take him over to the baby-sitter’s? That’s fair, don’t you think?”
“Yeah; and no, I don’t mind.”
“Have you been doing any woodworking during the day?”
“I ain’t got no wood and ain’t got no money to buy none. I wanted to make us a dynamite wall unit to put all the books in, and a new bed frame—one that I can fit in—but it cost money.”
“How much?”
“Well, I wanna put Formica on it. You know I don’t make no bullshit, baby. I’m talking about real pieces of furniture—works of art. Something you’ll be proud of. A couple of hundred; but a hundred would get me started.”
I went in my purse and got it, since I had just got paid. And I don’t know where my mind was, because the rent was almost due, and since he didn’t have an income, I was going to have to pay all of it. Again. I was just getting sick of coming home seeing him planted in front of the TV.
“Thank you, baby. This is gon’ be beautiful, I swear it is.”
* * *
When I walked in from work the next day, Franklin was hard at work. “Where’s Jeremiah?” I asked.
“Aw, shit, I knew it was something else I was supposed to do, baby. I’ll go get him right now.”
He forgot?
“Never mind,” I said. “Never mind.”
“I’ll get him tomorrow. I promise. I was just so into this I got lost, baby. I gotta change my measurements again. I’m sorry.”
The next day he didn’t forget, but Jeremiah had pooped and Franklin acted like he didn’t know how to change him and had left him on the bed, lying in it. I didn’t say anything.
I had to go to the laundromat, so I packed up the grocery cart and put Jeremiah on top in his baby seat. Franklin carried it downstairs for me. I washed five loads of clothes, and came home and cooked dinner.
By June, this routine was getting to be a little too much. When I asked Franklin why he couldn’t watch Jeremiah or take him to the baby-sitter and pick him up, since he was home all day, he said, “I could get a phone call at any time of day about work, and what am I supposed to say—‘I can’t come ’cause I’m baby-sitting’?”
I never had time to go to the health club, and when I did, I was too damn tired. I’d been looking forward to having the summer off, but when I found out that Franklin wasn’t getting any workman’s compensation, because it turned out he’d been drinking on the job and it was all his fault—he had neglected to tell me that part—I had no choice but to sign up to teach summer school. We needed the money. Though his cast was now off, he was so into the bookcase—which was turning out to be even prettier than I expected—he asked if I could just bear with him a few more weeks, until he finished the bed.
Like a fool, I said yes.
A few more weeks lasted until September. And that’s when I realized something. He didn’t want to go back to work. Which I sort of understood. And granted, he was making himself useful around the house, but damn. This just felt so lopsi
ded. I still loved the man, no doubt about that, but we were standing too still. I wanted him to do something. I wanted to be proud of him again. I wanted him to give me more reasons to look forward to spending the rest of my life with him. When we first met, Franklin excited me, kept me worked up. I never knew what to expect from him, and now I do. I guess the thing that hurts the most is knowing he has all this talent but isn’t doing anything with it, except building furniture for us.
I mean, I’ve been hanging in there with him. I know I’ve gotten on his nerves, but he’s gotten on mine too. I’ve often wondered, if I’d been off work the way he has, would he be as understanding. All I did know right now was that I’d been paying rent—everything, really—since March, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Franklin, we need to talk,” I said to him one Saturday morning after I’d asked him to watch Jeremiah while I went to the laundromat, and he said he couldn’t. “Why?” I’d asked. “’Cause I’m gon’ be using the power saw and drill, and I can’t hear him when he cry and I don’t want all this sawdust flying in his face. Take him with you…. Talk about what?”
“Everything.”
“Not another one of these deep conversations. I know it’s about my working, ain’t it? But before you get all into it, let me tell you something. My knee still ain’t right. It ain’t no way I can go out there slinging bricks and shit, or it could go back out on me. Is that what you want to happen?”
“No, but you can do a lot of other things—”
He cut me off.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but, Franklin, I can’t keep this pace up. I’m paying for everything around here, and this month’s rent is already late. After I pay the baby-sitter and rent and food and give you fifty dollars for wood and spending money, you know how much I have left out of my paycheck each month?”
“Naw. How much?”
“Sixty-eight dollars. This isn’t right, Franklin, and you know it.”
“Look, I’m almost finished with this bed, and that’s when I’ma start looking. If you can’t wait a few more weeks, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“You said the same thing in June.”
“I’m saying it now too.”
Something has happened to him, and I don’t know what it is. All I know is this: If he doesn’t have a job by Thanksgiving, he’s getting out of here. I only gave birth to one baby; I’m not taking care of two.
* * *
I was starting to feel depressed all the time and didn’t know what to do about it. If it weren’t for Jeremiah, I don’t know how I’d get from one day to the next. He’s got six teeth now, and last night he took his first step—at nine months old! Franklin didn’t seem all that impressed. I put him in the bathtub—Franklin has never given him a bath—and sang to him while I bathed him. He likes it when I sing to him, and even sounds like he’s singing too. After I picked him up and put his sleepers on, I gave him a bottle, and he was out like a light.
Franklin, as usual, had drunk his normal half pint—he’d cut down, he said—and had passed out on the bed with his clothes on. He was really starting to nauseate me.
But even though I was dead tired, I sprang up from the couch and walked to my music room. It seemed like a foreign place. I sat down at the piano and looked at it. The next thing I knew, my fingers were pressing the keys, and a melody surfaced. And it kept coming and coming and coming. I couldn’t believe it. The magic was still there. I hadn’t lost it at all. I cried hard and looked out the window and up toward the sky. “Thank you,” I said, and I know He heard me. When I slid away from the piano and stood up, I felt different. Unlike anything I’ve ever felt in my life. As if something heavy had been taken out of me and something light put in its place. I opened the lid of the piano seat. It was full of music I’d written over I don’t know how many years. And that’s when something that I’d never even considered before, hit me. Not only can you sing, Zora, but you can write. Do you have to stand on a stage to sing? Do you have to make records in order to affect people? I started pulling my bottom lip inside my mouth with my teeth. God, hadn’t I dreamed of what it would feel like standing in front of those people with a microphone in my hand? I sifted through the papers. These songs were good, but I knew that when some of the melodies went through my head, it wasn’t always my voice I heard singing the lyrics. Writing these songs was cleansing in and of itself. I always felt different when I finished. As if I’d been through something, gotten over something, had a breakthrough of some kind. Could I settle for this? Without even thinking, I put the papers on the piano seat and walked down to Jeremiah’s room. I just looked at him. What if I did get a record contract and made it big? That would mean I’d be on the road and away from home a lot. Wouldn’t it? Jeremiah shifted in his crib. I’m away from you enough as it is. “Too much,” I said aloud, and walked out of his room.
28
Since Zora thinks she’s superwoman, I decided I was gon’ let her be just that. She the one who think she got something to prove. All she do is throw shit in my face—how much she can do. Yeah, she’s a good mother. She pays all the bills. She teaches. And now she’s writing songs and shit again. I’ma get a job, but when I feel like it. She pressuring me all the time, and it seem like the more she get on my case, the less I feel like doing.
One thing I can say, though, is that I’m getting a whole lotta satisfaction working with this wood. It’s the only thing I’ve made lately—besides Jeremiah—that I’m proud of. Zora don’t seem to be that impressed by it. I do everything I can to get her to show me that she proud. When she come home, I got seven-foot boards laying right in the middle of the floor. And what do she say? “Franklin, do you have to do that here? Jeremiah can hurt himself.”
All she think about is Jeremiah. He just done took over. It seem like he’s her man, ’cause he get all the attention around here. I’m the stepchild. What she don’t realize is how this shit makes me feel. And I’m tired of doing shit to get her attention, really tired. And even if I got a job right now, it wouldn’t make no difference. Besides, I’ve had it with construction, really fuckin’ had it. What she don’t realize is how it feels to work and work and work at something and when you don’t get no-goddamn-where you just lose all desire to do it again. That’s exactly where I am, but it’s kinda hard to get your woman to understand that you feel lost. Like I don’t know what move to make next, and that’s why I just concentrate on my wood. It’s something I know I’m good at. It’s something I can see the end results. I can look at it and say, “I made that.” But Zora don’t understand. All she think about is the bills. How lopsided this shit is right now, have been. But if she really loves me, she’s just gon’ have to stick by me while I get through this. Until I can think of something else to do.
Right now I can’t think of nothing.
29
“Who you calling now?” he asked me.
“Why?” I asked.
“Whenever you come home these days, all you do is cook and then get on the phone. What about me?”
“What do you mean, what about you?”
“You could pay me a little attention sometimes.”
“Like I don’t?”
“Naw, you don’t.”
“Franklin, please.”
“Franklin, please, my ass. It’s that kid you love, not me. Now put the phone down.”
“I’ve got to make a phone call.”
“I said put the phone down and talk to me.”
He snatched it from my hand, then yanked it completely out of the wall. “Now who you gon’ call? Look at me, Zora!”
He was scaring me. Jeremiah was in his playpen, and in an instant my mind raced back to last summer up in Saratoga. But he wouldn’t. He promised. “Franklin, take it easy, would you.”
“Oh, so now you gon’ tell me how to act, is that it?”
“What’s bugging you all of a sudden?”
“Everything. You. This fuckin’ kid. Me. Everything.”
�
��Have you been drinking?”
“That’s all you think about, ain’t it, is how much I been drinking. Yeah, I been drinking.” He opened the cabinet and pulled out a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. It was almost full. Then he twisted off the top and took a long swallow. “You want some? That’s probably what you need to loosen your stiff ass up. Here, take some.”
He started coming toward me.
“Franklin, please. Stop it.” I turned my head away, and he grabbed my face and looked me dead in the eye.
“Fuck it,” he said, and threw the bottle against the wall. Liquor and glass splattered everywhere. “Just fuck it! Fuck you. Fuck this kid. Fuck everything!”
“Franklin, come here.”
“Just leave me alone, would you? Make your goddamn telephone call. I’m outta here.”
I just stood there for a minute and heard the door slam. What the hell was wrong with him now?
“Dada,” Jeremiah was saying. I walked around the corner and saw him sitting in the middle of his playpen. “Dada,” he said again, and I just started crying and touched his tiny hand. “Dada’s gone,” I said. “And good riddance.”
I took Jeremiah upstairs so I could use the bedroom phone. I had written Reginald a note a while back and told him why I wasn’t coming back for lessons, and he had left a message on my machine telling me that he was sorry, wishing me the best of luck, and saying that if I needed any connections or advice, to let him know. I just wanted to know how he was feeling these days. But he wasn’t home. Judging by his voice on his machine, he was okay.
* * *
I was in bed when Franklin came in. I hadn’t been able to fall asleep because I kept wondering if he was coming back or not. Part of me wished he would just go away. Jeremiah and I would get along fine without him. He wasn’t serving any purpose anymore. He seemed useless and hopeless and was draining me dry. Sometimes I’d walk through the house and think of when we first met, how beautiful it was. When I’d hear a certain record, I’d remember how much we used to laugh. But all that’s changed. We haven’t gotten anywhere together. He hasn’t kept his promises. He’s not doing anything with his life, at least anything I can see that would help me believe that one day we could actually be a happy family. And I’m tired. Tired of this boring-ass lifestyle. We never go anywhere. We never have any money to do anything except eat and go to work. This wasn’t part of my dream, and I’m not settling for this bullshit. Jeremiah and I deserve better.
Disappearing Acts Page 36
