Awed just watched him, a thin smirk painted across his face. When he’d heard and seen enough, he waved his hand at Clarence, blew some air from between his lips, turned, shot Campbell an even look, and descended the stairs to his apartment—and quietly closed the door.
Clarence let out a wounded sound and crumpled to the floor. He pulled his knees up to his chest and began sobbing uncontrollably.
Campbell’s heart was racing. She’d never seen a man cry before, none except for the drunks in the Brookline Projects. But this was different; this was out-and-out sobbing that she’d seen only from women at funerals.
Campbell snatched a napkin from the holder on the kitchen table and carefully approached Clarence, not sure what to do and finally just sort of stuffing it between Clarence’s clenched hands.
“Th-thank you, princess,” he said as he began dabbing the corners of his eyes with it. “I’m so sorry you had to be here for this madness.” He forced a shaky smile. “Awed is just a piece of shit.” A fresh stream of tears poured down his face. “A bastard,” he added, and then wiped at his face again. “Well, I suppose it’s all out in the open now, huh, princess?” he mumbled as he stood up and brushed at the creases in his pant leg.
Campbell didn’t know what he was referring to, the part about Awed being unfaithful or that he was a piece of shit. She looked at Clarence and then down at her feet. “Uhm,” she uttered, and bit her bottom lip.
“Well, it’s not that I’m ashamed of being gay, it’s just that not everybody understands or accepts it, you know what I mean, princess?”
“Oh,” she said, understanding now. “Oh, uh-huh.” She raised her eyes to meet his.
“Well, so now you know.” Clarence shrugged his shoulders before wiping at his eyes again. “Now you know, and I suppose you’ll run and tell everybody you know.”
“No, I won’t,” she said a little too quickly, and felt like maybe she should cross her heart and swear to God, but she just shook her head for emphasis.
Clarence ran his hands over his hair and cleared his throat. “Well, good. It’s nobody’s business but mine and that piece of shit downstairs.”
He smiled at her, but the sadness and the hurt were still swimming in his eyes.
“Men ain’t shit. You’ll find that out soon enough, princess.” Clarence straightened his shoulders. “Don’t ever fall in love; it’ll kick you in your ass every time,” he said, and turned and walked down the stairs.
Campbell watched him move away, defeated.
She remained there in the hallway for some time, chewing on her already chewed-away fingernails, waiting for the second round of anger, but it never came.
Late that night, as Johnny Carson bade his audience good night on Fred and Millie’s nineteen-inch Zenith, Clarence’s breathless “I love you’s” stole through the vents, and Millie hugged herself, wishing Fred was lying beside her, uttering the same.
AGE THIRTEEN
Campbell’s hips protrude, and her behind does much of the same. She’s interested in lip gloss, perfume, fancy hair clips, and fashion magazines now.
Millie notices her daughter’s approaching womanhood like one detects something from the corner of one’s eye when the mind is concentrating on other things. A glint of gold that turns to brass. Campbell should be her main concern, but Fred is all that she can think about.
Campbell is a young lady now, Millie explains to her. She needs to remember to keep her legs closed and crossed at the ankle, not at the thigh.
She spews other decrees, regulations, and requirements that Campbell tries hard to remember and hang on to, but they’re swept away with the April breeze when Trevor Barzey walks up to her one day and says hello.
Trevor Barzey, a brown-skinned, thick-lipped, slanty-eyed brother from Jamaica, lives on the seventh floor of 256 Stanley Avenue.
Rumor has it that he has children from various girls Campbell went to preschool with, those and the twins he fathered on 86th Street with a woman old enough to be his mother. “I’ve seen them,” her friend Pat said. “They have his eyes.”
He’d been with most of the girls in the neighborhood.
The fast-talking ones who wore summer hot pants straight through October. The ones who lined their eyes and glossed their lips.
He’d had some parochial school girls, the nondenominational Sunday-go-to-meeting girls, and the ones that scored high in algebra and history.
He’d had all of them, so when he turned his attention to Campbell, she was flattered.
Trevor talked a lot about the white man, the revolution that wouldn’t be televised, and the fact that his father had been a Black Panther.
Luscious told her that she’d known Trevor’s father, and warned her niece that owning a black beret and dark shades did not a Black Panther make.
In the beginning, it’s just conversation; he confronts her when she returns to Stanley Avenue to visit her friends and Luscious. He asks about her parents first and then school. His eyes move over her high firm breasts that strain against the pink of her sweater and then drop to her hips and shapely thighs.
“You all grown up and stuff now.” Trevor speaks from the side of his mouth as his eyes continue to travel Campbell’s body.
They begin to meet like that every Sunday, and Campbell finds herself looking forward to seeing Trevor, him touching her wrist and sometimes fingering her hair.
By May, they’re spending time in the hallway, him stealing kisses from her before she steps onto the elevator that brings her up to Luscious’s apartment.
By June, they’re up on the top floor, in the stairwell that leads to the roof. Campbell’s pressed up against the wall, the cold cinder blocks against her back, wondering how she will smell after she leaves him because people piss against those walls.
Somewhere below the steady buzzing sound of the overhead fluorescents, she hears the heavy zipper of Trevor’s Lee jeans come undone.
Campbell slides her hands down to his waist and looks over his shoulder at the wall and then at the floor and the puddle of grape soda someone has spilled there, looking everywhere except at his crotch.
He grabs hold of her hand and guides it between them, places it . . . down there. She feels it, and it feels hard. Her breath catches in her throat, and she concentrates harder on the purple puddle of soda.
He presses against her and forces his penis to slide between the curled fingers of her damp palm, and then he slips his hand beneath her sweatshirt, the white one that has Angel spelled across it in bright pink letters.
Campbell holds on to his penis, not sure exactly what she should do, her mind wandering onto the Italian bread Fred sends her to buy at the grocery store. She holds his penis like the Italian bread, like she’s standing in line waiting to pay.
He begins moving faster and faster, and she can hear him moaning and whispering things in her ear that she does not understand. But her grip is tighter now, and she closes her eyes against the purple soda and pissy beige cinder-block walls.
“Ohhhh,” he moans, and it echoes through the halls, and Campbell’s eyes fly open again—and finally she looks down at his penis and understands immediately why they call it a dick.
It’s so swollen she thinks it’s going to explode, so she squeezes down hard on it, tries to crush away the wavy-looking veins that are pushing through the skin. She squeezes down hard, and he makes that sound again that echoes through the halls and gets her insides boiling.
His whole body is pushing and pulling, and his hands have forgotten about her titties and are now flat against the wall, trying to push the wall down. “I—I—I—”
He’s trying to say something, so she squeezes again because maybe his words are caught inside his dick.
“Shit!” he yells, and suddenly her hands are wet.
“Shit,” he whispers, breathless this time, and she realizes that her hands are wet and sticky.
He falls against her for a moment and then rolls off to the side and onto the wall.
/> “Damn,” he mutters as he wipes his dick off with the end of his T-shirt.
She looks down at it again. It’s not long, hard, or throbbing anymore. It’s drawn up, shriveled and glistening like the dwarf pickles that float in the jar on the counter at the corner store.
Campbell wonders if this is what love is.
AGE FOURTEEN
She notices them because the child, a girl with big eyes and small lips, smiles all the time, while the mother—petite, dark skinned, with the same wee lips—frowns. In the summer, Campbell sees them standing near the corner to the west of the house, or across the street by the wall where someone has written, Jesus Saves. Other times, just before the sun dips, they move close to the bodega.
She notices them because the child, no more than two years old, is so well behaved, content as long as one hand is clutching her doll and the other is wrapped tightly in her mother’s hand.
When the rain falls, they huddle in the vestibule of the building that is diagonal to Campbell’s brownstone, the child waving hello and goodbye to the residents who move in and out of the doorways. Smiling, always smiling.
The mother makes way, but her frown is constant, and her eyes never leave Campbell’s stoop for more than a few seconds at a time.
When autumn arrives, she notices them because they are more conspicuous in their white winter coats with faux fur collars the color of red wine.
Millie notices them too. Not at first, not in the summer or in the early days of September, but they catch her eye during mid-October, when the leaves are burnt orange and brilliant yellow.
They are on the corner, beneath the tree, leaves falling around them like rain, and Millie’s pace slows so that she can get a good look at the little girl with the crimson collar.
“So cute,” Millie says, and then looks up at the woman.
When their eyes meet, Millie’s shoulders stiffen, and her mouth drops and then snaps tightly shut before she moves on, her pace fast, her body trembling.
The woman’s eyes are sparkling, and for the first time her frown has turned upright into a smile.
Once in the house, Millie smokes, cusses, and polishes the mantels in between making trips to the windows, snatching the curtains aside, and swinging her eyes up and down the block looking for the woman, the child, and her husband.
Sometimes she looks so hard that she bumps her head against the glass and, disgusted, she sucks her teeth, mutters a curse word, and then snatches the front door open and steps out onto the stoop.
But her eyes just fall on neighbors and strangers making their way home from work.
When Fred finally comes through the door, that woman’s autumn leaves are swirling at his feet, and his face looks like a cozy blanket; his eyes are soft and full like pillows. Millie knows that look; she has been acquainted with it more than fourteen years. That is his after-lovemaking look.
The look on his face, the swirling leaves at his feet, and the memory of the frowning woman send her into a rage, and she’s in his face before he can complain about the house stinking of Pledge and Merit cigarettes, because all Millie has been doing since she walked through the door is smoking and polishing the mantels and mumbling over and over, “That bastard, that no-good bastard.”
Her hands are balled into tight knots that turn her skin red at the knuckles, and her shoulders are hunched up close to her neck. Campbell’s stomach growls, but she won’t even fix her mouth to ask about dinner, and she goes into the kitchen to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“Millie,” he starts, but she hauls off and slaps him across his face before he can finish. “Woman, are you crazy!” he screams as he stumbles backward from the blow.
“Yeah, niggah, crazy for marrying your sorry ass!” Millie screams back.
Campbell jumps up, and the plate and sandwich go crashing to the floor.
Fred is just standing there in shock, a hand cradling his cheek while Millie starts talking so fast that the only words they grab onto are “Whore” and “No respect.”
Fred tosses back “You crazy” and “Bellevue.”
Millie is through with throwing words, so she kicks off her slippers and throws those; she does the same with the brown-and-tan Mary Janes that sit in the corner, snatches up the lamp from the end table, and finally yanks off her wedding ring. Fred ducks and dodges each object, and they all end up on the floor behind him.
“You crazy, woman,” is all he says before walking up the stairs and into their bedroom.
Millie doesn’t follow; she just grabs up her dust cloth and Pledge and begins polishing the mantels again.
When the letters start coming, plain white envelopes with Fred typed neatly across the front, Millie doesn’t know what to make of them.
She won’t open them. Opening them would mean facing the truth completely, and she’s not ready to do that, so she places them on the kitchen table, or on the refrigerator door, behind the magnet that says, Cancún.
“You told me it was over,” she whispers to him when Campbell has gone upstairs or into the living room to watch television.
“It is,” Fred says in a bored voice.
“Then what the hell is this, huh?” She points at the envelope.
“How would I know? I haven’t opened it.”
“Then open it,” she hisses.
“When I am ready,” Fred says before snatching up the envelope, stuffing it into his pocket, and walking out the back door.
She watches him from the window, out in the cold, cigarette hanging from his lips, hands shaking as he works at opening the envelope.
The wind snatches at the letter, but Fred holds on tight until he’s read every word, and then he refolds it, reaches in his pocket for his lighter, and lets the blue-and-yellow flame have its way with it.
Millie’s tears come then, and so does the throbbing at her temples. She’s out of pills, and there’s only one beer left in the fridge, so she snatches it from its shelf and eases herself down at the kitchen table, propping her feet up in the chair, lighting a cigarette, and popping the tab from the can.
Her mind will wander to her mantels, but mostly to the wrong turn she took fourteen years ago that landed her here.
* * *
There is no love inside apartment 4G, 256 Stanley Avenue. Only silence and brooding since they’d left Detroit on the heels of their mother’s death in 1953.
There is no love in that place, and Luscious doesn’t invite any in, especially the love that walks on two legs and arrives with flowers, calling her beautiful and trying to convince her that she’s in need of a good man, leaning in close and whispering that they would be sweet together. Sweet.
Luscious just scoffs and laughs at them, not one of those wide-mouthed, tilt-your-head-back-on-your-neck types of laugh that would reveal the cotton-candy pink of her tongue and the rotting centers of her molars. If she’d laughed like that for them, they would see and know without her ever having to tell them that all the sweetness she’d had in her life came from the powdered coating of doughnuts and the sugary syrup of cola.
No love, just Luscious working double shifts at the factory, coming home dog-tired and evil, not sharing a word with Millie unless it was to scold her or warn her against the evil of men.
No love and no tenderness, and so Millie looks for those things from her aunts and uncles on Flatbush Avenue; she looks for it from her teachers and the crossing guard who smiles at her in the mornings when she’s on her way to school. When she’s older, she looks for it from boys who want to touch her beneath her skirt and stick their tongues in her mouth, and later, when Luscious finally loosens the reins she has on Millie, she looks for it from the men who whisper words that make her blush before they take her in their arms and lie to her about love.
Millie has had three heartbreaks by the time she finally notices Fred in the fall of ’64.
She sees him at the bus stop; he’s small, but stretches his five-foot-five frame a whole two inches taller when their eyes f
inally meet.
His ring finger absent of a ring, she smiles her brightest smile and asks God to please, please let him be the one.
They date for three months before she gives herself to him. His touch is sobering and does not spring the wild madness that her last lover’s touch did. Millie supposes that it’s a good thing, a safe thing.
She accepts him between her legs on a day she has marked off in red on her calendar, a day that is one of five that is possible for her to conceive on, because she’s studied Fred, his movements and philosophies on family, and what makes a man a man, and she’s confident that when she meets him for lunch a month later and whispers in his ear that she’s with child, he will do the right thing, the responsible thing.
The tuna fish and rye gets caught in his throat, and he looks over Millie’s shoulder and past the counter into the chrome of the industrial-size coffee machine; he catches sight of his freedom skipping off into the sunset before suggesting that they do the right thing, the responsible thing, and marry.
The wedding is small.
They wed in March at Our Lady of Grace, a tiny old church whose pews are splintered and whose stained-glass windows are patched with cardboard and masking tape, which does little to keep out the winter cold, so no one removes their coats and they curse themselves for leaving their gloves in their cars.
They take the vacant apartment below Luscious, and Millie busies herself with her new home, husband, and impending arrival. Campbell comes just six months later, and soon after that Fred begins to change.
There are late nights and the lingering scent of perfume clinging to his shirt collar. In his pockets there are bits of paper, some with numbers and others with just a name, a place, and a time.
Millie calls the numbers, shows up at the addresses, and sometimes questions the women who are there.
Campbell is always with her. A reminder for Fred and the belief in family he once held. Millie bundles up her child in the yellow snowsuit and sets her down in her carriage before stuffing a warm bottle in her purse and setting out to look for her husband. Her husband.
Loving Donovan Page 3
