Minding Ben

by Victoria Brown

  And for a second time I said, “What?” to something I perfectly understood.

  “Buller-man, nah,” he elucidated. “I and I don’t stand for that, at all, at all, scene.”

  The men either did not understand what Brent was saying or chose to ignore him, laughing along with the little girl they called Chloe. “You really think so?”

  “But ’ow you mean? Jah-Jah nah make man for man. A pure ’bomination that.”

  I wondered who would think that two men out pushing a princess in a swing should be put to death by fire.

  “Anyhow, time for me to go, yeah.” Brent gave Dame a final push and put his arm around my shoulders. “See you come Saturday night?” He kissed me again and left, smelling so good I kind of understood how Kathy put up with Donovan’s bullshit.

  I continued to push Dame, gently again. “You like this, Dame?” I asked him. “You like swinging?” He couldn’t say yes, but he kicked his legs and wiggled his arms.

  “Is this fun?” He kicked some more, and one of the men next to us said, “Isn’t it amazing how fast they grow?”

  Dame was having such a good time, being in the open air and flying in the swing. I remembered from primary school: How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue, and spinning through the air on the tire swing my father had hung us from the guava tree behind our house. That was the closest I had come to flying before my trip to New York. The closest I had come to feeling free.

  DANNY HAD DESK DUTY that night, and he stepped off the platform when I walked in.

  “Hey, Gracie Mansion. Didn’t see you last night. Thought you were”—he drew his finger across his chicken neck—“gone for good.”

  “You would think something like that,” I retorted. Up close Danny was especially vile. The top hat kept slipping down his forehead, causing him to tip his wedge-of-cheese head back, exposing a bramble of unclipped nose hairs.

  “So what,” he wanted to know, “you had an extra day off or something?”

  “Yes, Danny, I had today off.”

  “With pay?”

  “Manicou,” I said under my breath. “Why are you asking me my business?”

  “Huh.” He sucked spit through his crooked teeth. “I never get a day off with pay, and I’m an American.”

  “Good night, Danny,” I said and made my way around him. Two young girls, both lamppost lean with long, straight hair, walked into the building laughing and bumping into each other. Danny lifted his hat with exaggerated courtesy as they walked by. They ignored him and got on the elevator with me.

  “Oh, my God,” one said and fell against the wall of the elevator. “I can’t believe we did that. Oh, my God. We’re super seniors now.”

  The other one laughed even harder.

  “Okay, come on,” said the first one, “pull it together. My dad’s at home.”

  But neither could pull anything, and the second one crashed against the elevator wall, making them both laugh even louder.

  “Seriously,” the second one said, anything but serious, “your doorman is such a dog. He’s as ugly as butt.”

  “As ugly as butt,” the first one repeated, holding her middle and whipping her hair about. “Oh, my God, he is so nasty. Did you check out his teeth? Dude, use your dental and get some braces. And that stupid-ass hat he has to wear.”

  They got off on the eighteenth floor, laughing just as hard as when they came on.

  It was Miriam who opened the door. “Hey, Grace,” she said, turning to check the time.

  “Evening, Miriam.”

  She rubbed her belly. “I’ll come in in a few minutes.”

  More than cleaning toilets or mopping floors or dusting figurines I hated taking photos of Miriam’s growing belly. And more than all of that I hated that I hadn’t told her. While I waited for Miriam, I unpacked the few lighter pieces of clothing I had brought back to the city, including my brand-new halter top. It wouldn’t be halter weather for a while yet, but you never knew. Plus, I didn’t want to leave something so expensive at Sylvia’s. Miss Micky might get ideas.

  Ten minutes later, after I had shot pictures of the washing machine and the wall, Sol came and stood behind Miriam. She dressed facing him, her naked bottom toward me, but then, instead of getting out of my space, she came and sat on the bed. Sol edged closer to my room, and I wondered what was going on.

  “So, Grace, how long have you been here now?” she asked.

  “Just about a month.” It would be exactly a month come Wednesday.

  Miriam nodded, and Sol watched me. “Sol brought these home today.”

  She slid the folder toward me. The low lamplight deepened the pockmarks on her face. Sol cast an ogre’s shadow on my wall. “What is this?” I asked.

  “Open it,” Miriam said.

  I had no idea.

  Immigration forms. I grinned and thumbed through the pages, some of which were already filled out in Miriam’s loopy, schoolteacher handwriting.

  “Are these my sponsorship papers?”

  Sol said, “Yup, we’re keeping you, Grace.”

  The flimsy folder was so light, but the papers it held meant so much. The papers meant my freedom.

  “We think you’re working out. Ben adores you, you keep the place clean. Suzy told me she wanted to steal you for her girls.” She turned quickly to Sol and then back to me. “After Pesach I told Sol we should get the forms today and surprise you. Didn’t I, Sol?”

  Miriam leaned closer to me. “We have to place an ad in the paper to make sure that no Americans want the job. You’ll have to pay for that, and all the filing fees and postage.”

  “And what happens if an American answers the ad?” I asked Sol the lawyer my question.

  Miriam answered, “We’ll just say that the position is already filled.” I wondered how many of the ads in the Echo were placed by women being sponsored.

  “So okay,” Miriam was saying, “read through them and fill out your parts. If you have any questions, you can ask Sol.”

  She reached over and hit him lightly, and he said, “Yup.”

  I needed to say something. “Thanks, Sol and Miriam. I had no idea you were going to do this. I’ll give you back the forms tomorrow night.”

  “Well”—she slid off the bed—“wait until you have the money and give us everything together. You have to pay the fees, you know, and I think you need to have some photos.”

  “Oh . . . sure. Of course,” I said, already thinking that I would use the money I had put aside for my father. I could make it up. And maybe, instead of going to Sylvia’s and wasting Saturday and Sunday, I could find a weekend job.

  Miriam and Sol walked through the kitchen and into the living room. I looked more closely at the forms in the folder. The INS wanted a lot of information. Everything about my mother and father, siblings, education, my height and eye color. Everything. I would tell them anything they wanted to know. I thought about calling Kathy, but with Sol and Miriam in the living room, I’d have to talk too carefully. I decided to go up to Dave’s.

  He didn’t look very good. “You feeling okay?” I asked, following him straight out to the back patio. It was cold to be sitting outside thirty floors up.

  Dave sat and passed me a beer. “I’m good, Grace. How are you?”

  But I didn’t believe him for a second. His hair looked as though it hadn’t been combed in days, and his baggy old sweater hung to his knees, almost covering his shorts. The sleeping dogs pressed against his lounge chair, and four empty beer bottles were in easy reach. The twin towers gleamed, a sparkly number eleven in the not quite black night sky.

  “So, what did you do for Passover?” I asked.

  “Oh, the boys and I just got in the truck and drove up to the country.”

  “You have family in the country?”

  “Uh-uh. I wanted to be alone, so I just went up to the house.”

  “You have a house in the country?”

  “I do. Duck Hollow.” He shifted to look at me, and t
he sweater gaped away from his neck. “Sol and Miriam haven’t mentioned it?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  He turned again. “They love Duck Hollow. When Vincent was alive, they’d come up almost every summer weekend. Miriam rode at the stables, and Ben learned to walk up there.”

  I’d never asked this question of a man before. “Vincent was your boyfriend?”

  He looked at me with such sadness. “If I turn the garden this year, I’ll take you for a weekend.” He paused. “If you wanted to go, of course.”

  “Of course I want to go. What do you plant there?”

  “It was mostly Vincent’s garden,” Dave said with a laugh. “Very practical Italian. He planted herbs and vegetables. Seasonally appropriate, zone six vegetables. I’m surprised Sol and Miriam haven’t told you anything about the place. Even in the winter, when Vincent and I went to Key West, they’d go up without us.” He balanced the beer bottle on the handrest. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  “Grace, Vincent was Miriam’s brother. Haven’t you heard Ben call me his zio?”

  “Her brother?” I didn’t try to hide my surprise. The wall in the Brooklyn house featured Pope, priest, and policeman, but no planter. Even when Sophia had said the blessing, she’d made no mention of a brother Vincent.

  “Vincent liked to grow things too?” I asked. “Did he grow eggplants?”

  “Some years. Why?”

  “It’s nothing. At Miriam’s parents’ house in Brooklyn on Good Friday her father said he didn’t like eggplant.”

  “He said that? And you were at the table?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did anybody say anything?”

  “Not really. Miriam laughed.”

  Dave shook his head. “Miriam can’t help who she is. She tries, but Brooklyn gets the better of her sometimes. She was the only one in his family who talked to Vincent. When he got sick, even the priest and the nun, they never came to see him.”

  I tried to add this softer side to the Miriam I knew, but I just couldn’t reconcile the images.

  “Now I’ve gone and made you depressed.”

  “A little bit.” I felt sad for Miriam’s brother cut off from the big Forgione table, for Dave going up to the country alone, for Sylvia with her crazy husband in the G Building, and for my mother with one-quarter of her family stranded all the way in New York.

  “Hey, listen,” Dave said, sitting up, “you want to neuter my papaya?”

  “What?”

  “Neuter”—he ruffled Brutus or Cesar—“like boy pets. But I guess it wouldn’t be neutering if your operation will make the tree fruit, right?”

  “Dave, what are you talking about?”

  “Remember you told me you knew how to make the papaya bear fruit?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay, well, let’s do it.”

  “Right now?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t cut plants at nighttime.”

  “Really?” Dave asked. “Anything else I need to know?”

  “Well, I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time that it’s not appropriate to wear shorts in February.”

  “Cheeky girl. Didn’t your mother tell you to respect your elders?”

  In fact she had. “Over and over.”

  “So tell me why we can’t fix the tree tonight?”

  “Okay, but don’t laugh.” I gave him my serious stare. “It shocks the tree.”

  “Grace.”

  “No, Dave, for real. If one of us was unwell in the evening and my mother needed to boil up some bush tea, she always woke up the plant first”—I slapped my hands together lightly like my mother had done—“and then she would tell the plant she was troubling its sleep to heal a sick child. She taught me to respect nature too. There’s no way I can give a plant a sex change in the middle of the night.”

  “Sounds like superstition to me, but okay. The next time you come up early, snip snip.”

  IT WAS STILL TOO early to go to the park, so I took Ben with me up to the thirtieth floor. Dave opened the door after the first ring, Brutus and Cesar close to his bared legs. “What took you so long?” he asked.

  “How do you mean?” Ben scooted past without greeting his zio and grabbed the dogs. “Gentle, Ben,” I warned.

  We headed out to the deck. “Let’s just say, I had a feeling after last night you’d be coming back soon.”

  Outside, next to the papaya, Dave had opened a stepladder and laid out several pairs of cutting shears on the worktable. I laughed. “How did you know?”

  He looked to see where Ben was. “Because no one can resist turning something gay straight.”

  He was joking, of course, but I didn’t think it was funny. “That’s not why I want to cut the tree, Dave.”

  “Of course it’s not, Grace. I’m not talking about you, silly.” He came and put his arm around my shoulder. “I’ll tell you the truth. I do feel a little funny about doing this. It’s the kind of thing my father and Mr. Forgione would have considered for me and Vincent if it was an option, you know. In reverse, of course.” He shrugged. “But this is a tree, and I like papayas, so let’s do it already, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  It didn’t take long at all. I climbed up the ladder, and Ben left the dogs to come over to see. “Pass me the medium shears, Dave,” I said.

  He did and then hoisted Ben onto his shoulders so he could have a better look at what I was about to do. The wood was soft and spongy, easy to cut through at the crown, where the male flowers hung down like useless tentacles. Near the end I told them to step back. “Hey, Ben, when I count to three, yell ‘Timber!’ okay? One, two, three.” We all cried “Timber,” and the leafy crown crashed to the floor, scaring Brutus and Cesar away from their spots. Ben clapped, and Dave tossed him in the air.

  “Okay, now get me a container,” I said.

  Dave came back in a few minutes with what looked like a solid crystal vase. “Are you serious?” I asked him. “You don’t have a plastic container, or an empty paint can?”

  “But won’t this work? It’ll look nice in the sun.”

  I shook my head, feeling like my mother, and worked the glass onto the fresh stump. Down from the ladder, I took the pinch of dirt from my father and wedged it deep into the papaya’s tub of soil.

  “And what was that?” Dave wanted to know.

  “That was the magic, my friend,” I told him. And Ben opened his green eyes wide. “Magic, Grace?”

  “Uh-huh. Now keep watering it as usual unless it rains, and let’s see what happens.”

  LATER THAT MORNING, DUKE watched us from his platform. “Did you enjoy your day off, Caribbean Queen?” he asked. I didn’t answer but wondered again if the doormen didn’t have enough to do without marking the sitters in the building so closely.

  Kathy and I sat in the park. Ule limed with us, not really chatting, just passing her blue-covered New Testament close to her eyes and rocking the Bloomberg baby whenever it fretted. From across the way, Evie scrutinized us openly.

  “Grace, what that lady have with you?” Kathy was in an antsy mood, and she too rolled her baby’s carriage back and forth, using the tip of one of her BeDazzled sneakers.

  “Who knows? From the beginning her blood didn’t take me. How’d you dazzle the sneakers, Kath?”

  She looked at her feet, and Ule stopped reading to check them out too. “You wouldn’t like to know the trouble I had to go through to fit these into the machine.”

  “You do a fine job, though,” Ule said.

  Evie’s eyes were still fixed on us. “She needs to stop fucking staring before I go over there,” Kath declared.

  “Watch you language, child,” Ule said.

  Kath apologized and asked Ule if she had anything she wanted BeDazzled.

  Ule laughed. “I have a mind to give you a jersey for you to do my name. But I gone from here just now.”

  I hadn’t heard this before. “Where
you going, Ule?”

  “Wherever the next job is, my child. You must remember is only baby nurse work I does do. As soon as they hit six, seven weeks, I done, you know. Close your mouth.”

  I did, but I still stared at her. Ule was the only sitter in the park who I felt truly liked me. I had Kath, but Ule was different.

  “And who knows”—Ule talked, keeping her eyes on her testament—“plenty woman in the tower making baby. Maybe is right here self I going to stay.” But I felt that she was just saying this for me.

  “Grace, I need to talk to you about something.” Kath said it in a way that made Ule close her testament with a sharp snap. “I didn’t mean for you to go, Ule,” she said, but it didn’t sound sincere to me.

  “Is not a problem, my darling,” Ule said, rolling off. “Time to get this little imp upstairs anyhow.”

  “Well, I have something to tell you too, Kath,” I said.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Last night when I came in, Miriam had the sponsorship papers.”

  “You lie.” Kathy raised her voice, and Evie whipped her head in our direction. Kath flipped her off.

  “Oh, my God, Kath, no,” I said, but I was laughing.

  “Bitch, serve she right. So tell me about this thing. What she say?”

  “That I was working out and they want to keep me.” I was so excited. “I have to pay for everything, of course, but, Kath, I’m doing it.”

  She reached for the tip of her ponytail. “And you prefer to do this than marry Sylvia cousin, Grace?”

  Her tone irked me. “Kath, if you ever saw the piece of man I talking about, you’d feel the same way. I have to kiss Bo if I marry him.”

  “One kiss, Grace, and you don’t even have to fuck him.” I winced. “And, even if you had to, what is a fuck if you get your freedom for it? You talking as if is for real.”

  I didn’t agree at all. “It is for real, Kath.”

  “You too stubborn. You know how long sponsorship will take? Daddy always say white people make his grandfather cut cane in Caroni for five years for one stinking acre of swampland.”

  Her reference to indentured laborers annoyed me. Her father owned three supermarkets. “And who running everything home now? Not the same people who start off in bound.”