What was it about that afternoon that was rattling against her rib cage, disturbing her now almost fifteen years later? On the surface the peace of that afternoon was astounding as the brother journeyed around the piano taking Goldie to places that made her nod and smile when he hit on and then paused over one of Sam’s favorite tunes. Everything about Goldie’s demeanor that day, her poise, whispered acceptance. Nothing to do with Goldie agitating Neena now. Even Nan had been uncharacteristically quiet, no proselytizing about how important it was now for Goldie to put her hand in the Lord’s hand, didn’t even start in on Neena about her irregular phone calls, the color highlights in her hair, her lack of a church home wherever she was living these days. It was the memory of Nan’s face that was bothering Neena now. How sad it was. Sad and resigned. Just sad and resigned. Where had all that contained hope gone? That’s what was bothering Neena now.
Neena was quiet after Bow Peep’s final note held and then melted into the predawn air. Bow Peep tried to draw her out. Threw around lines of poetry, about life not being no crystal staircase, and still you rise little lamb, and I too sing America and contain multitudes. He asked then what she thought of his playing? “Nice,” she said, “very nice.”
“And how’s sis doing lately?”
“Fair, they say she’s still doing fair.”
“So you got big plans for tomorrow? What you planning to read?”
Neena hunched her shoulders.
“It’s almost breakfast time. You wanna go get some eggs and oyster crackers?”
“No thank you,” she said.
“Neena, you’re shattering my heart against my chest wall. What’s wrong, please tell me, tell me, what’s wrong?”
She didn’t say, just unfolded herself from his flute case and asked if she could please use his phone.
She’d never called her in the middle of the night like this. She was surprised at how quickly she answered, how wide awake her voice. “Nan,” she said. “Nan it’s me, Neena.”
“Neena? Are you still in Philadelphia, Neena? Or did your job take you away again?”
“When did you last speak to her, Nan?”
“What? Who? Oh sweet Jesus, Neena, I’ve told you, you got to pray about this obsession. The Lord will remove it but you got to ask.”
“When, Nan, can you please tell me? Please.”
“It’s been some years.”
“How many?”
“Many, Neena. It’s been many, many years.”
“Was nineteen eighty-nine the last time?”
Nan’s voice fell to a shadow. “I do believe it was around then. Nineteen eighty-nine. The last time, yes it was, yes it was.”
There was silence then as they listened to each other breathe. Bow Peep bowed his head as if he was praying. Neena broke first. “So how are you, Nan? I mean, I know you’ve got a lot going on with Tish and all. But how are you?”
“I’m doing, I’m doing, Neena. And I do believe, Tish’s situation is gonna work out.” Neena could hear that her grandmother’s nose was draining, remembered that’s how her grandmother cried. “How are you, Neena? Right now, that’s what I want to know. How are you?”
Chapter 17
AN HOUR LATER it was still dark as Neena kissed Bow Peep’s cheek and they parted ways at the Wawa where he’d just bought her a large cup of coffee. She pushed through a blossoming chill in the air headed to Walnut Street to catch the 42 bus to get to Nan’s. Wanted to get there during Nan’s sewing time when the hum of her sewing machine softened the air. Wanted to get there too before she lost her nerve to beg her grandmother to tell her what she knew. She walked up Broad Street that was yawning itself awake with the swishing sounds of street-cleaning trucks shooting dense sprays of water that looked pink in the loosening dark. She picked up her pace to try to out walk the familiarity, the ways that this stretch of street felt suddenly like it did when she was a child. She didn’t see a bus coming, didn’t want to keep still and wait. Walked up Walnut until about Nineteenth, where a small assemblage of people were gathered under the transom of the bus stop, their quiet chatters commenting about the weather, the bus being late, the price of gas.
Neena said good morning. Two black women who looked to Neena like Florida and Wilona from Good Times, both with green hospital scrubs hanging beneath their coats, said ’morning in return; a young brother said Yo, ’sup; union-looking white man in Eagles garb nodded; young white woman allowed a thin crack of a smile. “The 42 does stop here, right?” she asked of no one in particular.
“Better or SEPTA got some explaining to do,” the Wilona-looking one said.
“You mean you got some explaining to do,” this from Florida. “And you better pray that time clock you got to punch is in a good mood.”
“Well,” Wilona said, motioning toward Neena, “if I was still young and cute like this chile, I’d pat its head and put it in a good mood.”
Neena focused through the dark gray air and looked directly at the woman in her faux brown shearling and hat and scarf and gloves in matching burnt orange chenille. She was accustomed to sarcasm from women. From a child she’d seemed to evoke the looking up and down that certain women did. Though Wilona’s mouth painted in a brown as dark as her coat was pulled back in a half-moon, natural-looking smile. Neena smiled in return, blushed a little.
“Chile, hush,” Florida said. “Was we ever that young? Or that cute?”
“And if we were, did we have sense enough to use it?”
“No, ’cause we was just about being hardworking, not smart-working.”
“Girl, you ain’t said a word. When I think back on the missed opportunities—”
“What you talking, watching people get promoted all over top of me—”
“People I trained—”
“And me getting indignant instead of putting on some false eyelashes and batting them—”
“Get up on the down stroke.”
They all laughed then. Neena too. Grateful suddenly for the feel of her laugh pulling from deep in her stomach. They backed up from the curb as the bus, not the 42 though, pulled in and all save Neena and Wilona and Florida got on.
Neena looked from one to the other. “You know what,” she shouted over the sound of the bus pulling away, “I can look at y’all and see if you had it to do over you’d do it the same way, the right way, all over again.”
“Go on and depress me ’cause you know you telling the truth,” Wilona said.
“And you’re still cute too,” Neena said. “Both of you. Beyond cute, you’re beautiful.”
“You wanna be my daughter?” Wilona asked. “’Cause I need to hear what you saying ’bout fifty times a day. Your mama living? She willing to share you?”
“I lost my mother,” Neena said as she rocked from side to side and sipped her coffee.
“Well, now you truly protected, nothing like having a mother doing her thing upstairs on your behalf.”
“I guess,” Neena said. “I mean, I just wish I knew, you know, one way or the other, you know, she’s been missing.”
“Oooh.” Florida sounded as if she was about to sing as she held on to the word. Then Wilona asked Neena how long had it been.
“Years and years,” Neena said, and then nodded. A firm nod. Felt the nod in her chest as if her insides were acknowledging something that hadn’t yet chiseled its way to the surface. She finished her last swallow of coffee and then looked around for a trash can, saw one across the street at the entrance to the Rittenhouse Square Park. “Let me get rid of this,” she said as she ran across the street to toss the cup. Then remained on that side of the street to allow the drizzles of traffic to pass. A car with its music sounds exploding zoomed up the street and screeched to a stop right in the turn-in for the bus. She recognized the song “Soul Man” by Sam and Dave. The driver’s side door was half open, lighting the inside of the car and putting the man and woman inside—kissing with some fervor—on display. Neena almost chuckled as she looked across the street an
d watched Florida’s and Wilona’s faces frown and smirk as they talked. Imagined one was probably saying, Why don’t they just get a room, the other saying, Or at least turn that music down, bad enough the young ones blast theirs, he’s an old fool. The driver jumped out of the car to go open the passenger-side door just as Neena started to cross the street. She froze. Didn’t know which registered first in her brain: the car: a burgundy Ford Tempo; or the man with the donkey-shaped head: Ramsey from the West Philly bar the first night she’d arrived, the one whose watch and ring had bought her a place to sleep. She edged away from the curb even as Flo and Wilona waved to her and called out, “This is the 42 bus coming.” Neena coughed, pretending the cough as her reason for covering her face and turning away. She resisted the urge to run. Do nothing but call Ramsey’s attention to her if she ran. Run to where anyhow. Through the park? An Episcopal church on another corner, closed stores up and down Walnut Street, gleaming high-rise doormen-protected condos otherwise. Told herself that he might recognize her. That night seemed so long ago, though really it had only been a couple of weeks. She leaned into the tubular trash can with her back to the street and pretended to vomit. Hoped a rat didn’t jump up through the darkness and go for her nose. Had read that rats had been prolific around here, prompting the city to initiate swift containment efforts because this was a moneyed area, but environmentalists had begun to squawk because the squirrels started disappearing right along with the rats. She wished she’d kept up with the issue to know who won, to know what the odds were of getting mauled leaning over this trash can. Now she felt a hand on her arm and she was about to lift her foot and jab her heavy vinyl Salvation Army boot into his kneecap. About to holler rape. But then she saw the burnt orange chenille glove, felt the warmth from the glove pulsing all the way through her cashmere coat. “You okay, sugar?” the one who looked like Wilona asked. “You want us to hold the bus?”
Neena nodded. “I think that creamer in my coffee must have been bad,” she said as she listened for the whoosh of the car door shutting, the music now muffled inside the closed-up car. She bent her knees to shorten her stance as the car zoomed away. Then stood all the way up. Wilona handed her a peppermint as they crossed the street. She tried not to look at the woman who’d just left Ramsey’s car, but the woman was so prominent as she stood there blushing in a cheap wig and weathered complexion. Neena felt sorry for her that the likes of Ramsey made her blush. Relieved that the woman wasn’t getting on the 42. Only Neena and Wilona and Florida got on the 42.
Once on the bus, Neena avoided the window seats, sat up close to the bus driver in the seats reserved for the handicapped. Slouched to lower herself and talked her breathing down. Florida and Wilona joked with her from where they sat further back, asking her if she’d craved pickles and ice cream lately, if the dry cleaners had started shrinking her clothes around the waistband. “Please don’t wish that on me.” Neena laughed.
“Last I heard, wishing ain’t had too much to do with it,” Wilona said.
“In my case it did,” from Florida. “I got five kids and I can remember saying to myself before I got caught with each one, ‘I wish this man would hurry up ’cause I gotta get up early for work,’ and then to hurry him up, I’d let him come out of the raincoat I’d make him wear.”
The several other people on the bus giggled, even the bus driver’s shoulders moved up and down, and Neena wished they were going the distance on the 42, almost to the end of the line like she was. They weren’t. They got up just as they neared Penn. Stood in front of Neena as they waited for the bus to stop. Wilona put her hand to Neena’s forehead. “Well, it ain’t the flu ’cause you not the least bit warm. You take care of yourself, you hear, sugar.” Neena smiled and nodded.
“And just let him take his time,” Florida said in her singsongy voice and they both laughed out loud as they disembarked.
Neena tried to hold the sound of their laughter in her head. Tried to use their laughter to keep her from looking into the bottom of the well and seeing the sludge there, the sludge being her behavior, the places her behavior had taken her, the justifications she’d use to obscure her behavior; the main justification, her mother, she had to find her mother, she had to eat and live while she tried to find her mother, live as well as she could while she tried, opulently if she could, a good-looking man to move against her late at night if she could. Tried to close her mind to the consideration that every man she’d been with had been Ramsey-like; they’d been smarter, more accomplished, they’d driven better cars, been younger, more handsome, taken her to hotels with turndown service, she’d found them in places far and away from that ghetto bar with the lit apostrophe, but they’d all been Ramsey. Now her grandmother’s voice was working its way into the fading swirl of the laughter, trying to say some insulting thing to Neena, asking her why she had so much hate in her heart. She thought about that the rest of the ride, thought really that was not an insulting thing to ask.
She was at her stop. Her hands were chunks of ice inside her gloves as she grabbed the silver pole so that she wouldn’t fall when the bus jerked to a halt. The steps to get off the bus were like a mountain ridge and she looked back to smile and say thank-you to the bus driver before her descent. He was a young boy, a cutie pie she thought as her foot touched down and she got the sense that she was on dangerous ground, could feel the heat of the ground as she crossed the street, as if her footfalls now were stirring up some dormant gases and soon the ground would explode all around her. The row houses on Spruce Street seemed larger than she’d remembered, or was it that she felt shrunken, could even be because the trees were bare, more than bare, gone, saw stumps as she looked down Spruce Street. Crossed Spruce to walk up Fifty-eighth to Delancey. Overgrown hedges left a line of dew on her coat. And here she was, right back again where she’d landed her first morning here, at the corner in front of Mr. Cook’s Hoagie and Variety Store. She stood in front of the door. Again, she could almost smell the cheese steaks, the Dixie Peach hair pomade that flew off the shelves on Saturday morning. Could almost hear the ring-chime-ring of the pinball machine. Though she couldn’t hear it really. She sat on the steps and folded her head in her arms, put her arms against her knees. She tried to invoke Mr. Cook right now; surely his essence was here; surely he was sending her some message from that other plane where dead people were, saying something to return her to innocence the way he’d always done.
A sensation was coming to her now, nothing though to do with Mr. Cook. She was thinking of the way the sheets smelled that day when Nan and Tish had returned from the mother-daughter tea and Neena had cursed at Nan and Nan slapped her over and over again. She realized now that it wasn’t day. It was the night before. Her sixteenth birthday. She was in bed and the air outside was introducing fall so Neena and Tish had removed the box fan from the bedroom window and put the sliding screen back in so that they could sleep under the natural breeze. Neena had just settled down between crisp cotton muslin sheets that smelled of the backyard clothesline, an airy smell that was comforting to fall asleep to. Neena fought sleep though. She fingered her new gold ring, a birthday gift from her Nan, an extravagance, but Nan said it was appropriate since Neena was sixteen now and on her way to young womanhood. Neena had an unsettled attachment to the ring though. She tried to shake the feeling by continually running her thumb around her ring finger. It really was a beautiful ring, graciously cut into the form of a cursive N, a diamond chip at the center. A sacrifice for Nan the ring was, Neena knew. Nan would probably be taking the next year paying the ring off to Mr. Knock, the sell-anything man who came through Delancey Street every Saturday taking orders for everything from window drapes with Travis rods to GE refrigerators to Singer sewing machines. He’d come through and collect twice a month, picking up as many hard-luck deferrals as cash but he’d take whatever they could pay; though if payment was continually deferred, Mr. Knock would just reprocess the unpaid-for item. Nan was obsessive about paying her bills on time, so Neena knew that
she wouldn’t lose the ring to forfeiture. Nor would the ring just fall off, she knew; Nan had confirmed that too by trying to pull it off and having to tug and twist the ring to ease it past Neena’s knuckle.
Nan had also made chitterlings in honor of Neena’s sixteenth birthday, something she did generally only once a year around New Year’s because of how time-consuming they were to clean. Neena salivated as she tried to fall asleep at how wonderful that batch of chitterlings had been. Thought that night that perhaps Nan did have some feelings for her evidenced by the splurge of the ring, the chitterlings. She enjoyed a sense of contentment that night as she inhaled the airy aroma rising off the sheet and she listened to Tish whisper her prayers. Neena had stopped praying by then because she no longer believed that prayer changed things. And even though she no longer considered it an obligation to pray, she felt an unevenness about it, about religion in general, that she didn’t believe because she was somehow incapable of believing, and that made her less of a person than her sister. Tish’s nightly prayers just served to reinforce Neena’s own feelings of diminishment. But the day had been so otherwise delightful that Neena wasn’t even reacting to Tish’s praying as she watched Tish’s shadow on the other side of the room unkneel itself and go through the ritual of removing the dozen stuffed animals from the bed, lining them in size order on the bench under the window. Neena wanted to ask Tish how much did she think Nan had paid for the ring, but she knew Tish had old-woman ways to be only thirteen and didn’t talk for a time after she said her prayers; instead she cleared her bed of the animals one at a time the way she was doing now, at the last animal now, finally, a palm-sized mink that she’d named Neena because she said that it had a beautiful dark coat just like Neena’s hair.
Trading Dreams at Midnight Page 26
