She could hear the pleasure coating his voice, taking his voice lower, throaty, getting all inside of her as he said, Hey, extended the hey, drew it out like a song. “I gotta say I am thrilled to hear from you. I figured you’d probably dumped the very idea of me the way I had to rush out of Hugh’s.”
She laughed from deep inside herself. “I was under the weather, that’s why I didn’t call the next day. Is everything all right at home?”
“Everything is everything, Neena. I was actually out of town all week.”
“I know, I called—”
“Really? See. I checked in every day. Did Neena call? I asked—”
“I didn’t leave a message—”
“Okay, I’m relieved. I was thinking maybe it was the tie.”
“Huh? Tie?”
“I was wearing a pink tie the day we met, and I’m usually not into pink ties, and in retrospect I had a rough day in that pink tie.” He coughed. “Until I met you—”
“What color is your tie today?”
“It’s—well, let me look at it, what color is my tie? That’s a catchy book title, you think? Some guy made millions on a book about the color of a parachute. I should write one about the color of ties.”
She knew the book about the parachute. “And the tie would represent?” she asked. “What? Choices?”
“Exactly, “Cliff said. “Choices that men make, middle-aged men who feel that they’ve gotten the butter from the duck in terms of, in terms of what? In terms of fulfillment from you know, from jobs, family, you know the civic responsibility-type things, you know, and one day somebody asks you what color is your tie and you have to stop and look because you don’t even remember, because chances are the tie was probably a gift, so you’re walking around in somebody else’s preferences for you, and you probably got dressed in a semi-fog anyhow, so of course you don’t know the color tie, and, and, damn, I’ve spun way out there, haven’t I. Whoa, Trigger, let me pull the reins on this horse right now before he starts a stampede.” He laughed.
Neena laughed too. “So, what color is it?”
“Striped, actually, let me see, there’s gray and navy and a light green.”
“Lime?”
“I guess that’s what you’d call it, yeah, lime. I don’t really know colors.”
“You’ll have to know colors for your book, though.”
“Do you know colors? You could help me write it.”
“I mean, their names, yeah, but there’s a whole psychology around color, you know, which colors look good on you, how colors make you feel, you know, affect your mood.”
“I guess that’s why psych wards have light blue walls.”
“Been there, have you?”
“Felt right at home too.”
They both laughed. Neena felt the laugh deep in her stomach. Now Cliff was stammering, trying to invite her out. Again she was caught off guard with how awkard he was; it was reassuring. Not like that last one, Cade, whose finesse should have been warning enough.
“I’m done at about six today,” Cliff was saying. “Can I make it up to you this evening for the way I had to bail on you last week?” he asked.
Neena said sure, six worked for her. He told her where his office was; she said she’d be in the lobby at six.
Cliff ’s substance reminded Neena of her first boyfriend, Richmond. There was complexity there, unpredictable variations of gray that were provocative in ways that the what-you-see-is-what-you-get black-white formation of most of the men she’d been with could never be. She’d thought most of them simpleminded strivers; trying to get something on the side without consequence, intelligent for sure, but essentially dim about the big themes that moved below the surface. Their hungers were so conventional, their egos so easy for her to satisfy: make this one feel young, that one handsome, the other one adept at pleasing a woman. She wasn’t sure what Cliff was starved for, though, didn’t know, given her current situation, if there was time for her to discover it. Still, she was intrigued by him, the way that she’d been intrigued by Richmond.
She was turning sixteen the year she met Richmond. She wasn’t pretty in a classic way like Tish was pretty with the nicely shaped forehead, the soft nose, the blushable cheeks, and the cleft in the chin. One had to decide for himself if Neena’s features came together in a pleasing way: the droopy eyes that had a wildness about them, the pouty heart-shaped mouth, the asymmetrical cheekbones. Most men deciding her look was pleasing when taking into consideration the way her hips jutted despite her tall slender build. Her grandmother accusing her of walking in ways to maximize the slant of her hips. “God don’t like ugly,” Nan would say. “I saw you switching right in front of Joan’s husband with that hot-in-the-behind look plastered to your face.”
Neena wasn’t hot in the behind, really. Though she also wasn’t oblivious to how her look affected a man, older men mostly. Thought the boys her age silly and trite. So she was surprised to find herself actually attracted to Richmond. Richmond wasn’t his real name but that’s what everybody called him because he lived in Virginia but spent summers here with his aunt who lived around the corner on Spruce Street. The aunt’s backyard looked into Nan’s backyard.
Richmond was light with a face full of freckles. A loner, like Neena was a loner. Well read and headed to college like Neena too. She’d see him at the library summer afternoons and felt sorry for him. Couldn’t fathom why a teenage boy would be leaning into books instead of splashing in a city-run pool, or shooting hoops, or sneaking into the movies, or bagging groceries at Thriftway to save up for a new Atari game machine. She knew why she was there. She was there reading daily newspapers from Newark, from Cleveland, from Detroit, from Chicago. Cities from where Freeda had called in the past, cities to which she may have returned. Neena was drawn to newspaper accounts about anything having to do with a black woman in her mid-to late thirties. Had even called the Auburn Hills police department inquiring about an unidentified body but that corpse was only five foot two and weighed two hundred pounds. Freeda was five foot six and slender. At least Freeda had been slender the last time Neena saw her.
Richmond was political, Neena discovered by the books she saw him devouring: The Autobiography of Malcom X, The Miseducation of the Negro, even Mao’s Red Book. They started walking home together, taking the long way from the library on Baltimore Avenue around Cobbs Creek Park, even following the trail down into the park over to where the brick-faced guard station was. Neena told him how one of the park guards had been killed there in the early seventies. Said that her mother had described for her the evening that erupted with the sudden sounds of sirens and booted SWAT teams running through the streets of West Philly so that it felt more like a war zone. “A little girl was knocked off her tricycle and had to get eighteen stitches in her forehead. My mom said that she would carry that image forever of that little girl’s head splitting open. Said that the child was wearing a yellow dotted Swiss sundress with the cute little matching panties underneath and the force of the police barreling through the street actually flung her through the air. From then on that little girl could never walk in a straight line. Walked zigzag from then on.”
“Collateral,” Richmond said. They were at the edge of the creek that smelled of honeysuckle and sewage and he looked away from the creek, looked up at the sky and squinted, and Neena thought he had the saddest eyes.
“Meaning?” she asked. The dirt was soft under her rubber-soled flip-flops and she tried to keep her footing as she watched him twist and untwist his watchband.
“Meaning they weren’t intending to hurt her, but hell, in war they accept that the nontarget sometimes goes down too.”
“You say that like you know what you’re talking about, you know, like it’s personal.”
“Yeah, my pops and shit, yeah.”
“He was collateral?”
“Naw, he was a target,” he said, slowly. “You know, a Black Panther, so you know they wanted him dead.”
“Ho
w?” Neena asked on a whisper so soft that it blended with the sound the leaves made as they twirled on the breeze and she had to ask it again.
“Heroin,” he said, matter of factly.
“What, they strung him out?”
“No, not even that,” he said. “My pops never did dope, didn’t even smoke weed if you can believe it. But they tried to say he died of a heroin overdose. It’s all such bullshit.”
“Well, didn’t they do an autopsy? Wouldn’t that have shown that he never used.”
“See, that’s the thing. He did die from heroin, but he was murdered; the police, you know, they cold-bloodedly killed him. They tightened a belt around his arm and then shot him up because otherwise he had no track marks, just that one red dot where they’d plunged the needle that killed him. Plunged it in his left arm, and my pops was hopelessly left-handed. No way he could have shot himself up with his right hand.” Richmond had stopped twisting his watchband. Now he twisted his hand around his arm. He left red marks on his arm. His veins were green and bulged undeneath the red and it was hard for Neena to look at his arms because she thought how easy it would be for someone to kill him that way too. Now he balled his fists as he spoke. His voice, though, was steady, his face placid, that look of internal hysteria that Neena understood.
Neena’s flip-flops were losing the battle with the soft dirt and she grabbed Richmond around the waist so that she wouldn’t fall. He pulled her to him and kissed her. She had been kissed by boys in the alley behind Nan’s house before but they had been too eager and out-of-control, laughable kisses. She wanted to cry, though, when Richmond kissed her, the way he held back. She wished that there was a patch of grass underfoot where they could lie because she wanted right then to touch him at the center of his sadness, wanted to uncoil the sadness for him, for herself as well.
The following week, the day after Neena’s sixteenth birthday, she was out hanging sheets on the line. Richmond came over to help and Neena was full of complaints. Complained that Tish got out of the grunt work by belonging to a thousand different groups. At that very moment she said, Tish was with Nan at some kind of mother-daughter tea for one of the bourgeois societies Tish belonged to. Complained about Nan paying all she did for a clothes dryer and still insisted on hanging bedsheets on the line because she was superstitious. Complained that Mr. Cook had offered her a job in his store as his assistant sandwich-maker and Nan said she had to be sixteen first, and when she’d reminded Nan of that this morning, having turned sixteen the day before, Nan insisted that Neena first had to prove herself over the fall months by bringing home straight A’s the first report card.
Richmond held the ends of the sheets while Neena pressed the clothespins in place. The sun was high overhead and the air was yellow and soft. Richmond was close against Neena’s back. He covered her hand with his each time she affixed a clothespin.
“Tell me about your mother,” he said into her ear.
“My mother? Like what about her?”
“Anything. Her habits, her look, what do you miss?”
No one had ever asked Neena such things before and she felt her heartbeat climbing. Where to even begin: with her mother’s habit of hunching over the kitchen table cramming her mouth with Argo starch, her shoulder blades like knife points pushing through her paisley robe; or the stark look of Freeda’s eyes when she was too happy, unsustainable such happiness was, and it was as if her dark eyes understood that and refused to play along; or the screeching sound her mother’s nakedness made on the mattress in that room that smelled of turnips and whiskey—but no—that had not been Freeda on that mattress. That woman had been a stranger, vermin, Nan had called her, though Neena still missed the feel of that stranger-woman’s arms, the hunger in that woman’s arms; wondered if Freeda’s arms were similarly hungry for her. “Um” is all Neena could say then. “Um, um, um.”
“It’s okay if you can’t, Neena. For real, for real, I understand,” Richmond said. His breath was hot pushing in her ear. He kissed the back of her neck then, allowed his body to brush harder and harder against hers. Neena still saying “Um, um, um,” even as she squeezed her thighs to contain the yearning. The yearning confusing. Yearning for what? To be finally filled with a feeling that was larger than that of being a motherless daughter. Was there a feeling larger, or just another kind of shattering.
The sheets were yellow like the air, fully hung, and Richmond turned Neena around to face him. His eyes starved and begging and Neena pulled him along the side of the house and they climbed up the fire escape that led into the bedroom she still shared with Tish. Tish’s bed lined with her stuffed animals, her bureau like a fragrance counter at Wanamaker’s, organized rows of perfumes and colognes and body creams in pretty atomizers and gold-topped jars. Neena’s dresser bare, save a carved wood jewelry box that Alfred, Freeda’s father, had made; her bed absent adornments too, just the yellow ribbed summer-weight bedspread that she rolled away, then she took the top sheet off too.
Neena thought Richmond so clumsy and fast that this must be his first time; it was her first time and she wasn’t even sure if she felt anything, though she did sense that Richmond cried. But then they did it again and he took his time. He said her name and used his fingers and his mouth as he moved against her and Neena thought that she could hear the el; she always loved the backdrop sound of the el because it seemed that every house that they lived in with Freeda was close to the sound of the el. Though Nan lived many blocks from the el. But there it was, she was certain, the rumba el sound getting louder now, squealing as it came to a stop inside of Neena, the brakes giving off white sparks that held before they went away.
After Richmond left, Neena had to once again strip the bed down, though when these sheets were washed she put them in the clothes dryer. She remade her bed and turned the fan in the room on high to air it. She took a bath and put on the same clothes she’d been wearing when Nan and Tish left, cutoff denim shorts and the T-shirt that Nan detested that was emblazoned with the phrase IT’S A BLACK THANG. She arranged her thick puffy hair the way she thought it should look after an afternoon of doing mundane chores, a nonchalant bun. She had a full half hour to spare before Nan and Tish walked through the door. And after all of that, when Nan looked at Neena, it was as if she knew, as if she’d caught Neena and Richmond naked and tangled on the bed.
Neena was sitting on the back steps reading The Color Purple, absorbed so that she jumped at first when Nan called her name.
“Why you jumping like a guilty party?” Nan asked, no play to her voice.
“Ma’am?” Neena said as she got up and felt the sheets. They were dry and she began pulling the clothespins out.
“What have you been doing all afternoon?”
The sun was a ball of fire in the back of the sky and the air in the yard had gone from the soft yellow of earlier to orange and red with a hint of night. Neena pushed her breath into the sheet so that she wouldn’t turn around and glare at Nan. “Just reading and otherwise what you asked me to do,” she said. “The sheets, stuff like that.”
“Stuff like what? All I asked you to do were the sheets. So don’t go trying to come off like some Cinderella. You wouldn’t have had to do those had you consented to come along with your sister and me. Such a beautiful tea that was. You need to claim membership in similar upstanding organizations instead of hanging back idle letting the devil use you. Now I’ma ask you again. What were you doing all afternoon?”
The sheets were off the line. Neena inhaled their aroma as she walked them over to laundry basket resting next to where Nan stood on the top step. The sheets smelled like the corner where the Bond Bakery used to be, like the smell of flour and butter and sugar rising through the air. The bakery was right below the el tracks and she focused on the memory of that el sound, now the feel of that sound inside of her when Richmond had made the brakes squeal. She didn’t answer Nan. She pushed the sheets into the laundry basket and walked past Nan into the house.
Nan was a
t her back, demanding that Neena not ignore her, who did she think she was ignoring her. They were in the dining room. Neena placed the laundry basket on the dining room chair that sat next to the buffet. That chair and the one on the other side of the buffet were rarely used, only on holidays or special Sunday dinners when Goldie and Sam came up from South Philly or Nan’s church ladies, or Tish’s cute-girl friends for whom Neena would help Tish cut bread slices into perfect triangles to spread with water cress, or shrimp salad, or strawberry cream cheese. The punch bowl, similar to the chairs in its lack of everyday use, was centered on the buffet. It was heavy; took two people to carry it in from the kitchen when it was filled with 7UP and sherbet. She looked at Nan standing there in her white straw hat, her single strand of pearls, her white laced gloves. She wondered how heavy the bowl would be now if she picked it up and threw it at her grandmother. The idea of the punch bowl crashing into her grandmother’s head stopped her. She didn’t really want to hurt Nan, she just wanted to shut her up.
“Who was in here today? Did you have company in here while I was gone? Be just like you to have company in here when nobody’s home. Too much like doing things decent and in order to have company when I’m here so a proper acquaintance can be made.”
“I didn’t have company,” Neena said through her teeth. “I hung the sheets, I tidied up otherwise. I sat out back and read my book. What is wrong with you anyhow?”
“You big liar, you—”
“I’m not lying—”
“You will lie, I know that about you.”
“Jesus, Nan.”
Trading Dreams at Midnight Page 22
