Then Nan repeated what she’d said back in that room that smelled of turnips and whiskey. Told them that the only way they were going to have peace about their mother was just to accept her as dead.
“But what about when she comes back?” Neena asked.
“Well, then, we can be happy that she’s resurrected. But for now, she’s dead, Neena, like that woman back there is dead. Let your mother be dead and ask the Good Lord to heal your broken heart.”
Neena wanted to ask Nan if they could turn around and go back for the woman and help her off the mattress and take her home with them and give her a bath and feed her chicken and dumplings and resurrect her. They could help the woman find her own little girl and that child could feel the sun come up in her chest the way Neena felt whenever Freeda returned. Neena didn’t ask though. She listened to Nan talk about the power of prayer. She retreated inside of herself and stopped with the questions. She put on her nice-girl face and nestled deeper under her grandmother’s arm as they turned back onto Broad Street. She started to disbelieve her grandmother then. By then Neena was too familiar with the minty smell of her mother’s sighs. Had too often felt her mother’s backhand gently against her forehead checking for a fever, or Freeda’s fingers aimlessly pulling at her hair when she laid her head in her mother’s lap. By then she had curtsied for her mother too many Easters after practicing the recitation she’d say at the children’s service at church. Had too many bubble baths drawn by her mother, had her knees and elbows scrubbed too much, her eyelids kissed, her bangs curled under into perfectly shaped barrels. Had shaken her mother far too many times to bring her attention back when that hollowed-out stare overtook her eyes. Had crossed too many big streets alone to find a store that sold Argo starch when Freeda was running low. She’d cried too hard each time Freeda went away, the-inside-of-the-skull crying that caused her head to pound for hours after. She’d jumped like the cow over the moon elated at Freeda’s inevitable return. Because Freeda always returned. She’d return happy and able. Neena reminded herself of that as they walked. Too young to be aware that she was beginning the process of rejecting a lot of Nan’s teachings: that good is always rewarded in the end; that you reap what you sow; that joy cometh in the morning; that hard honest work is the antidote for depression; that Jesus Christ is Lord. Neena was even beginning to disbelieve that. A little at a time as if all the imprinting of all the things she knew to be true were being slowly lifted from the grooves, the grooves filling in with sand. Felt like a silver pinball in the game machine at Mr. Cook’s Hoagie and Variety Store when the lever misfires and doesn’t send the ball up the column into the game so the ball slides backward until it finally drops with a clang into the pocket separated from the balls still in play. Even as Nan pulled her closer under her arm, Neena felt farther and farther away.
Ramsey had finally stopped with the hee-haw laughter as Neena stood from her seat on the side of the tub and hung her things on the back of the bathroom door. She ran the shower then and got in and washed up. Scrubbed herself as much as the minuscule bar of soap would allow. She finger-parted her hair and plaited it in two uneven cornrows. She dressed and swallowed three glasses of spigot water. She felt as if she might vomit when she opened the bathroom door and stepped back into the room. Though music greeted her when she did. Sweet music. The sounds of Ramsey’s snores.
His keys were on the nightstand next to his watch. She snatched up both in one quick move, then retrieved her purse from the dresser, stepped into her boots, and grabbed her coat from the closet. She dropped the keys and watch in the coat pocket and headed for the door thinking she’d let him keep his wedding band. Stopped then and listened for the breaks between his snores as she tiptoed to the side of the bed and stood over him. She lifted his hand and brought it to her lips and kissed it, she tugged at his ring as she did. Not as if he was trying to honor what the ring represented. The ring was stubborn and she knew that she should just let it be. She’d lost a good ring once; her finger had throbbed for a week after missing that ring. His finger should throb too, she thought, as she looked at the bottle of Gordon’s to measure how much he’d drank. Told herself this was indeed a drunken stupor as she tugged and twisted the ring and thought about rubbing the finger down with shampoo, remembering then she’d used it to clean his essence from the skirt. Angry now at herself for even being here like she was some common whore. She wasn’t, she told herself, as she felt the ring loosen and gave it one more pull and it slid off into her palm. His hand, though, suddenly stiff and she blinked and then was looking into his wide open eyes. They were green eyes and that surprised her because he was a blackened complexion. Wondered if he was kin to the devil with eyes so light. The thought giving quickness to her movements as she backed up, said she was ready to go, was he ready to take her, wasn’t that Green Acres hilarious. Talking nonsense now as she reached behind her to open the door, watched him shake his head back and forth trying to shake his consciousness into full existence. She was out of the room now, running along the stained orange carpet in the hallway, down the first flight of stairs, hoping these were the ones that led to the car, a burgundy Ford Tempo. Shit, they were all white from the snow. She barely remembered the car’s shape. She heard him above her, on the balcony, really just a ledge outside of the room. She didn’t look up as he yelled for her to stop, called her a lowlife thieving bitch. “You touch my car and I’mma kill you,” he said. She slipped on the snow-slicked asphalt as she ran, recovered herself and hit the remote on the key chain, and ran to the car that flashed its headlights, saying Thank you, Jesus, the irony of calling on Jesus in this situation banding around her chest and she could barely breathe as she jumped into the car and blasted the ignition, jerking the car into reverse just in time to see him run from the stairwell. She took her time so that the car wouldn’t go into a skid as she slid the transmission into drive, turning out of the parking lot onto the highway, coasting until it was time for her to get into the E-ZPass lane.
She parked the car in downtown Philly in a tow-away zone. Daylight was making pink and yellow noises overhead as she pushed through the lower-budget shopping district lined with dollar stores and wig stores; jewelry we-buy-gold-and-silver type stores; multipurpose stores that sold fake Versace jeans, and the latest underground rap CDs. The bus station too was in this part of town with its trundling lines: the too-broke or too-prudent to take Amtrak, the too-motion-sensitive to fly, departing; the view of their backs quickly interrupted by faces of the newly arrived. That was her plan right now. Claim a hard seat at the bus station until the pawnshops were open and ready to deal. Get what she could for the watch and ring and hope for enough to buy a hotel room for the night.
Now she realized she had passed the street where she should have turned off. Now she was on Race Street in Chinatown. The whoosh of traffic on Vine Street moved from intermittent to continuously flowing. The lights from the Ben Franklin Bridge poked into the sky, the sky loosening itself up and shaking out widening bands of pink and yellow. It was a spectacular sight and she got chills as she stood there watching the interplay of the bridge lights, the light pouring from the sky. She was often hyperperceptive in the dawn hour. Affected by sensory detail that would have ordinarily escaped her. Like now as she heard a sound that almost did make her cry. The flute. She couldn’t believe this was the same musician from earlier, that he was playing “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” Thought at first she was imagining the sound, imagining him, but there he was sitting on the steps of the Hong Kong Restaurant.
She watched him as he played, glad that his feet were fully covered this time in barely worn Timberlands. Same long green coat he’d had on earlier; a quality, plaid muffler draped over his shoulders. He had a mild-looking face, long, like his nose and neck were long, long line of a mouth she could see even with his lips pursed. His shoulder-length locks were pulled back in a ponytail, his face shiny as if slathered recently with Vaseline. He eased the mouthpiece from his lips and his last note held ther
e shimmering in the air between them. Now his voice took up the space. “You got anybody laying down for you, baby?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“A bridge? You got a living bridge?”
“I have—a—yeah, I have a sister,” she said emphatically, then wondered who she was trying to convince.
“Yeah? Where is she?”
“Uh, here, you know, in Philly, I’m on my way to get to her, she might be having a miscarriage—” She stopped herself. She felt challenged, felt silly.
“Sounds like she’s in no better shape than you.”
“I mean, well, I have a grandmother here too, you know, it’s just—”
He raised his finger. “It’s cool,” he said. “I only asked ’cause it’s important for a person to know where their bridge is. If it’s your grandmother, you know, cool, so you go to your grandmother.”
She nodded. She didn’t know what else to say. And anyhow he put his breath back to his flute and resumed the song. The sound was like crystal curving through the air and Neena stood and listened until the end of the song. Then she rifled through her purse heavy with Ramsey’s watch and ring to pull up her last five-dollar bill. He held his hand up then to stop her. “Let’s keep it pure, baby,” he said as he put his mouthpiece back to his lips and started to blow some more.
She sat next to him on the steps. The concrete was hard and cold against her. She had been asked many things of a man in the predawn hour. Never purity. She could feel the widening bands of daylight moving through the air. Now he played “I’ll Be There.” The music’s largeness sucked the chill from the air. It was warm—the music, the air—as it seeped through her pores. She breathed deeply and took in the scent of car fumes mixed with dumplings frying. The music was inside her now, in her chest keeping time with her breathing. She didn’t even realize that he’d stopped playing until she felt his arm around her shoulder, his fingers falling against her forearm in ripples. So soothing his fingers were. His hand squeezing her shoulder now the way a brother would, drawing her in until her head took up the space around his long neck and she was doing what she hadn’t done since she was a teen. She cried. Big heaving cries that felt like drumrolls pulsing out of her as Bow Peep said, Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even that was to the beat.
Chapter 5
SO HERE NEENA was at the foot of Nan’s block unable to push through the shimmering bands of daylight. Such a clean block. The cleanliness, the Nan-inspired orderliness such a contrast to how Neena felt on the inside. Felt dirty and jumbled. Felt heavy-laden too, as if Ramsey’s watch and ring had grown inside of her purse and taken on the weight of concrete slabs. She remembered how light and innocent she used to feel on this corner when it was home to Cook’s Hoagie and Variety Store, the corner store that had served this community from the late fifties all through the eighties. Though now, in 2004, the Koreans owned the space; renamed it Spruce Beauty and Health Supply, peddled things like synthetic hair and rubber cement glue for affixing acrylic nails. Taped display posters in the window showed off straight-haired, flawless-skin black women in sequined gowns and mocha-colored lip gloss. The store a travesty to Neena because, though not their fault, the more recent owners didn’t understand the history, the realness of that place, didn’t know that this corner was a holy land of sorts to Neena. Neena had certainly likened Mr. Cook to God during her childhood because of his eyebrows that were a bushy silver gray. Freeda had told Neena that although no one had seen the face of God in its entirety there had been reports of his eyebrows that were the color and intensity of an Atlantic Ocean tide at a hurricane’s approach and Neena had blurted, Like Mr. Cook’s, Mommy? And Freeda had laughed. Exactly, exactly, Neena.
The people around here used to call Mr. Cook’s store the colored store to distinguish it from the one at the other end of the block called Whitey’s. Though by the time Neena and Tish were growing up around here the owners of Whitey’s—SMITH’S VARIETY was the name stenciled on the window—had long since let their store go, having been scared off by the Black Power of the sixties, plus by then they’d sold enough penny candy to the children around here to send their own children to medical school. Still the people called Mr. Cook’s store the colored store, though Neena never did because it implied that his prices were high, his goods inferior. And he’d explained to Neena the race tax. He paid more for everything: more for insurance, more for his mortgage, more for extensions of credit, more per item since he bought in smaller quantities since credit was so expensive.
Neena liked Mr. Cook. Liked it down there in his basement store that smelled of roasted peanuts and hoagie rolls; liked the ripples of activity as Mr. Cook’s wife waited on the customers and yelled at the children not to put their sticky fingers against the glass that showcased the candy they’d buy; Johnny Hartmann or Lou Rawls keeping time to Mr. Cook’s hacking knife separating the done meat for his specialty cheese steaks from the still-needing-to-cook; the ring, chime, ring of the pinball machine interrupted by some young boy’s profanity when the machine went tilt, that boy told to take his bad mouth out of the store. She especially liked that Mr. Cook would talk openly about her mother. Most people became preoccupied with their hands or the sky or a scratchy throat that suddenly needed clearing when Freeda’s name came up, as if she was already dead. Mr. Cook, though, would cut right to the core as if he were logging off a hunk of salami to run through the slicer. “No inkling her mind would go,” he’d say. “Sweetest girl you’d ever want to meet growing up, she would turn the lights on in here with her smile, like your smile, Neena. Never underestimate the power of a beautiful smile,” he’d say.
It was six months after the heater-man incident and Neena was perched on the cracked red leather counter stool listening to one of Mr. Cook’s Freeda stories as he folded scrambled steak and onions into a long roll. “Yeah, Neena,” he said as he squirted catsup into the meat and then arranged waxy white paper for wrapping the cheese steak in. “There was this one day, Lord, let me see now, must have been 1971, cold, real cold, kind of cold that snuck up inside of you and did its damage from your bone marrow and then spread out from there. Well, Freeda blew in here this particular day wearing two winter coats—one she had on the way a person normally wears a coat; the other she had tied around her like an over-the-neck apron. So she came in here turning the lights on with her smile. Telling me as she untied the coat from around her how people were looking at her like she was crazy. And I said, ‘Well now, Freeda, that might be a little understandable seeing as how you are wearing two coats.’ ‘Mr. C.,’ she says to me, ‘crazy would be allowing my perfect creation to be exposed to the elements.’ Then she gingerly undoes the second coat. Come to find out she was swaddling you up under that second coat. She unbundled you from all the layers she had you wrapped in. Handled you with such tenderness, she did. Finally when your little face come into view you was looking at your mother just-a-smiling, and she looking at you smiling, and I heated the bottle she handed me, thinking I’d just witnessed what Coltrane blew his horn about. A love supreme.”
Neena blushed at the telling. She felt innocent down there amid the swirl of Mr. Cook’s stories: not the same person who months earlier had almost done it with the oil man to get the heater repaired; not the same person who’d started charging the pimple-faced boys around there a dollar a minute to grind up against her in the alley—she was trying to save enough money to run away to find Freeda if Freeda wasn’t soon to return—she’d laughed when she’d told Tish about the boys, how not one boy had lasted an entire minute so it felt like free money, then tried to swallow her shame when Tish’s cute girl face collapsed in disappointment.
She looked at Cook’s eyebrows now cupped in a question mark as he focused his attention beyond Neena and Neena didn’t even have to turn around to know that Tish had probably just stuck her head in the door. It hadn’t failed yet that within twenty minutes of Neena nestling atop the red leather counter stool, her grandmother would summon her. And sure enough Mr. Cook said,
“Neena, your sister’s trying to get your attention.”
Neena sucked the air in through her teeth, would have said, “Awl shit,” if Mr. Cook hadn’t been in hearing range. “I was about to ask you how long my mother stayed in the store that day,” Neena said instead.
“There’s always next time,” he said, as his wife called out that Mackadoo was on his way down for a hoagie with everything, and Cook began spreading mayonnaise on a roll, his eyebrows dipping like a child’s drawing of birds in flight. Neena braced for Tish to tell her that she was wanted at home, Neena irritated that Tish so easily referred to Nan’s as home where the gold brocaded couch matched the gold brocade of the draperies that matched the gold matting in the framed art of Jesus ascending. The smells from dinner probably still hanging in the air, fried liver smothered in onions and gravy. Neena never could tolerate the taste of liver. Though really Neena had to concede that this was home for Tish. Tish was a joiner; she had friends here. Already a member of the scout troop that met around the corner, the youth group that met in the church so conveniently situated across the street, the Future Teachers/Doctors/Lawyers/Leaders Society, whichever Tish planned to be this month because her aspirations changed as frequently as the doilies on the arms of Nan’s brocaded couch. Good student Tish was, Neena too for that matter. Both in the mentally gifted school downtown that drew students from every section of the city. Neena glad for that, meant that when Freeda came back and moved them away from Delancey Street, they wouldn’t have to change schools.
“Tell Nan I’ll be there in a minute,” Neena said as she watched Mr. Cook line the hoagie roll with shredded lettuce, then salami slices, then ham.
“Nan doesn’t want you,” Tish said as she swiveled the counter stool in a circle, laughing that it felt like the cup-and-saucer ride she’d gone on when she went to Wildwood last week with the dodge ball team. Neena thinking again, like she’d thought when she’d first heard about it that only Tish could find and join a dodge ball team.
Trading Dreams at Midnight Page 10
