Minding Ben

by Victoria Brown

  She ate the tiniest triangle of roti. “Not necessarily.”

  “Oh, yeah, once you’ve overstayed, that’s it. You’ll get stamped ‘undesirable’ on your way out. We’re in the same boat, sister.”

  I expected her to laugh, but she didn’t. “Grace, my visa never expired.”

  “Now who’s the dummy? B-twos are only valid for six months, Kath.”

  “Who said I had a B-two?” She studied a chunk of curried potato. “Daddy got me a student’s visa, Grace. You know he knows Tom, Dick, and Harry.” She shrugged and set down the potato. “Nope, I won’t get stamped, and, when I get home, I’ll tell them not to date my passport and everything’ll be fine.”

  I stared up at Kath with my mouth open. “So you can go home and come back when you like?”

  “If I want. Daddy, you know.”

  But I hadn’t known; we weren’t in the same boat at all. “So you really going to do this? You’re going back for real?”

  She started folding up the sides of her paper plate, imprisoning the remains of her meal. “Well, we’ll see, Grace.” She smiled her old smile for the first time in a long time. “I gave someone an ultimatum, and if they want me to stay, then everything will be fine and my poor daddy might never get to be mayor.”

  Chapter 32

  As much as I waited all week for Fridays to come to get paid and to leave Sol and Miriam’s apartment, the reality was that coming home to Brooklyn offered me no respite. Sylvia’s apartment was wrecked. Before, I could come in and, after a few cosmetic changes, a quick sweep of the meat rug, the breakfront straightened, and everything else crammed into the hallway closet, I’d be able to relax. Now, relaxation was impossible. Jacob’s Russians had torn the apartment apart. What had started out as a cover-up job had turned into a full redo after the city inspector’s report decreed Sylvia’s dwelling a lead trap.

  A toxic confetti of chipped paint blanketed everything. Micky and Derek spent as much time as possible outside. During the long summer days, they played on the parkway’s sidewalk from when camp ended, at five, until their exhausted bodies demanded bedtime at ten. Sometimes they took Dame out with them, but more often Sylvia left him with the old Jamaican woman next door. Still, when he was home, he had unfettered access to the paint he so loved to eat.

  When I told this to Sylvia, she got mad at me. “So what it is you want me to do, Grace? Look at this place. Watch how we living like bums. You get to live like a lord with them white people in the city. You don’t spend the week here with we.”

  The apartment was a hot den. Because the grates had been removed, the windows were supposed to remain closed, and the trapped heat only swirled thickly when disturbed by the standing fan. The weathermen had been predicting a summer storm to come and wash it all away, but rain clouds showed no sign of gathering. Sylvia reclined on the couch in a thin red negligee with Dame in only a diaper flopped against her sweaty bosom. I lifted a piece of paint from the side of his mouth. “So call the city and complain, Sylvia.”

  “Grace, you don’t know how this city does operate. Is not when I want them to come”—she settled herself, and her belly shifted, sliding Dame a few inches forward—“they does show up without even telling you they coming.”

  I had nothing else to say.

  Sylvia burped from deep within. “At least the work getting done. This is only for a time. By the time they finish, them boy father will be home and things will go back to normal around here.”

  It had been weeks since I last saw Bo, and I had, of course, never got back the twenty dollars I’d lent to him. “Sylvia, when last you see Bo?”

  “Ages now, mama. He wouldn’t stay around here so to see them Russian and them doing work he should be doing.”

  “He by Dodo?”

  “Nah. Now you see it warm warm outside, he and Nello and them does camp in the park.”

  So Bo hadn’t been given the gutting job Jacob had promised him back in the spring. At least camping out in the park sounded like a fun thing to do. I had this picture of Bo and Nello and the other men he hung out with living in tents with a roaring campfire, singing songs and swapping jokes under the stars as they drank bottles of rum and played all fours until early dawn.

  Sylvia fanned the still air in front of her with her palm. “Lord, but this heat is killing me. I have half a mind to open them damn window, you know. Take Dame, Grace.”

  I leaned over and peeled him away from Sylvia’s belly, damp with her or his sweat. He was three now and still couldn’t form any words. The city had assigned a speech therapist to come to the apartment, but Sylvia said not until the workmen were done. She didn’t want strangers to see her house like this. She had so many plans for after the renovations were finished. Her husband would be well enough to come home; she would lose the weight; finally, Dame would start his therapy. Everything would be just fine once the work was done and she could get her life in order.

  “You doing anything in the morning, Grace?” she asked.

  I didn’t have any plans besides calling my mother at two. “No, why?” Usually her agency didn’t send her out on Saturday jobs.

  “Stay here with them children for me. I want to run down Pitkin before the big rain come for some curtain I put on layaway for when you see this place done.”

  “SO HOW’S THE BABY doing?” Cassandra Neil glanced at quiet Dame. “He started speech therapy?”

  Sylvia was right. Those city people didn’t give you any warning.

  “Um, you’re going to have to ask my cousin when she’s back. Did she know you were coming?” I was sure she didn’t.

  “Okay, okay. I was just asking.”

  She was very professional in her assessment. I sat on the couch with Micky and Derek on either side and Dame on my lap while she went from room to room, placing her meter against the walls and the radiators and the window grates propped against the baseboards. The children were very quiet, and I gave them each a candy. She finished and stood in front of us. “When’s your cousin coming back?”

  I looked past her to see the time on the VCR clock. “She should be back any minute now.”

  “Good, I need to wait for her.”

  There was no place to offer her to sit, even the box over the radiator by the window was gone. I got off the couch and perched Dame on my hip. “Sit down,” I offered. She said thanks and sat, and both Micky and Derek got up and disappeared into the bedroom.

  “So”—Cassandra pulled one leg up under her—“you register for fall yet? Hunter you said, right?”

  “Not yet.” Dame was liquid in my arms.

  “Well, I brought something for you.” She leaned forward and dug into her back pocket.

  “For me?”

  She handed me a card with two phone numbers written on it. “The top one is for the main admission office, and the second one is for Hunter’s direct admission. You should give them a call.”

  “Thanks.” I slid the card into my back pocket. “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “Oh, I just had a feeling.”

  Then we heard a key in the front door, and Sylvia came in. Micky and Derek flew out of the bedroom and down the corridor, and I heard her say, “Where? In my living room? Now?” She walked in carrying two shopping bags, her hairline beaded with sweat. “Miss Neil, I too too shame for you to come and see my place looking like this.”

  Cassandra got up. “Oh, Mrs. John, don’t mind. It’s not you, it’s the landlord. Come in and sit down. Hah, I’m telling you to sit in your own house. But sit, sit.”

  Sylvia sat next to me and reached for Dame. “Grace, but you didn’t even offer the lady a glass of water self to drink. Where your manners, man?”

  “No, no,” Cassandra said. “Grace did. I didn’t want anything. I was just waiting for you to come home.”

  “Get up, Grace, let the lady sit down.”

  I moved to the windowsill, but Cassandra did not sit down.

  “Mrs. John,” she said, “you can’t stay in th
is apartment with your children while this work is going on.” Sylvia started to speak, and Cassandra put up her hand. “No, you can’t. Your landlord has to find you other accommodations or pay for you and your family to stay in a hotel. He has thirty days to do that, and there can be no more construction in the apartment until you and your children are resettled.”

  That word made me think of Haitian refugees.

  “But what is this I hearing? Miss Lady”—Sylvia had forgot Cassandra Neil’s name—“I can’t leave my house.”

  Micky started to cry, and Derek said, “We moving, Mammy? But how my daddy will find us when he come home?”

  Sylvia looked around her house, and if she saw what I saw, she must have known that Cassandra Neil was right. “Well, they say what don’t meet you does pass you. But look how trouble come in my house today, nah.”

  “Don’t think of it as trouble, Mrs. John.” Cassandra sat down next to Sylvia. “If you’re out of the apartment, the workers can get the job done much faster than if you’re here with the children.”

  Sylvia shook her head. “You don’t know Jacob.”

  “I do know Mr. Kaplan, very well in fact. He’ll get to work.”

  I was listening and thinking only about myself. If Sylvia and the children had to move, I might not be able to go with them. Where would I go on the weekends? I couldn’t bear the thought of living with Sol and Miriam full-time.

  The thunderclap was so loud it stirred Dame from his deep, quiet place, and he howled. Micky and Derek ran to their mother, and Cassandra Neil said, “Wow.” Lightning flashed silver bright, and another boom of thunder made Micky fling her arms around her mother’s neck.

  “Stop behaving so stupid,” Sylvia said, but she rubbed Micky’s arm with one hand and patted Dame with the other. “Is just some rain to finally cool down this heat. Weatherman say this morning rain going to come.”

  Cassandra Neil got up to leave. “Wait until the rain pass, Miss Neil. This kind of weather could give you ammonia, yes,” Sylvia told her.

  Cassandra smiled. “You sound just like my mother, Mrs. John.”

  “Then your mother is a smart woman.”

  “PLENTY RAIN FALLING HERE too,” my mother said when the lady on the hill passed her the phone, “but is rainy season, so what else to expect?”

  “You leave Helen and Daddy sleeping?”

  “How you know?”

  I knew because, back home, the sound of a hard rain drumming on the galvanized roof was a country lullaby to the sweetest sleep.

  “So how everybody doing, Mammy?” I wanted to hear her voice. My carpeted nook was now storage space for Jacob’s workers, and I curled in a corner of the couch in the warm glow from the tatty maiden lamp. Sylvia and the children had gone to nap away the summer storm, and I had the living room to myself.

  “Everybody good, you know. Same thing as usual.” I didn’t expect her to say more than this. “How you going?”

  “Ah, I good,” I answered, but she knew me too well.

  “What happen, Gracie? Something wrong? You and Sylvia quarrel?”

  “No, no, is not that.”

  “So what it is, then?”

  Sylvia will have to move just now, and I can’t go with them. And the money I work for is not enough to rent a place and continue saving for Daddy’s foot, not to mention start saving to pay for school. And, I can’t leave Sol and Miriam because they’re doing my sponsorship. And, Kathy’s talking about coming home. And, I miss you and Daddy and Helen. And, I don’t like the rain in America.

  “Oh, Mammy, is nothing. Rain here just different from home is all.”

  She was quiet for a while, then said, “Huh, rain might be different, but you is still the same, Gracie.”

  “I suppose,” I mumbled, more for me than for her.

  “What you mean you suppose? You’re still the same Gracie who start to read when she was four, who always come out first in class, who tell Mr. Parris you not calling him Mister unless he call you Madam—”

  I laughed. “I did that? How much years I had?”

  My mother laughed too. “You playing you can’t remember? Not even five. From then on he called you Madam whenever he pass. You know they say when he was traveling on he sickbed, he laugh and say, ‘The child tell me to call she madam, oui,’ right before he give up the spirit?”

  I hadn’t even known he had died.

  “And is not you who pick up and decide to go America?”

  “Well, you had to let me go. Is not like I just walk out the house.”

  “You think I could have stop you, Gracie?”

  This was new to me, because although my mother and I had always clashed, she had also almost always won our battles. Even in the ones she did lose, she still triumphed by virtue of being the mother whose word and will had dominion over mine. Our house had not been a one man, one vote kind of place, and Helen and I were forever plotting bloodless coups to get our way.

  “Nothing I could have say or do was making you stay on this island, Gracie. I know that for sure.”

  So long I’d had to wait to hear this from my mother, and all I wanted to do was go home to her and take a long sleep to the sound of the falling rain. I couldn’t even begin to acknowledge what she was actually saying to me, so instead I asked again after my father.

  “Daddy good, I tell you. The sugar okay and the blood pressure not too high. The other day he even went alone to clinic for a checkup and everything looking good.”

  “He traveled alone? Why you or Helen didn’t go with him?”

  “That is what I trying to tell you,” my mother said, “everything over here going good. You just take care of yourself and not to worry about us.”

  She convinced me, but I still wouldn’t let her get off the phone. Not until she had answered my questions about my na, and Rhonda, and our dogs and the plants and trees growing around our house and in the big garden. Finally, when I was filled with the sound of her and home, I told her I would talk to her next time.

  After, I got out the card with the numbers Cassandra Neil had given me. Of course the admissions office at the college was closed on Saturday, but the main office in the city was open, and I requested a catalog and all the information they could send to me. I didn’t know what was going to happen at Sylvia’s apartment, so I gave the encouraging woman on the phone Miriam’s address in the city.

  SUNDAY NIGHT WHEN I got in, Danny jumped off his little pedestal and landed in my path with a sharp clap from the taps on his repaired shoes.

  “Hey, Gracie Mansion, I’ve got a question for you.” His pointed fingertip touched my chest.

  “What, Danny?” I didn’t want to talk to him or to anyone else. I had too much on my mind.

  “What are you doing after you get off from work this Friday?”

  “What?”

  “What you doing Friday? You wanna go get something to eat or go to the park or something?”

  I looked more closely at Danny, hearing that he was asking me out. Skinny, with the stupid captain’s hat on his too small head, his plucked-chicken neck stretching up from the wrinkled collar of his unpressed shirt, narrow, sloping shoulders, bad-fitting uniform, unpolished shoes, back up to the nasty teeth. I looked at him and willed Brent instead, sexy, sad eyes and goatee, that body I wanted to hold me, that smell I wanted to inhale. I shook my head. “I can’t, Danny.”

  “Hey, why not?” He sucked spit through his snout. “Maybe another day after work, I could come by if I’m off, or next Friday?”

  What was the non-Kathy way out of this? The way that didn’t involve a head thrown back with a wail of laughter, a fly swat of the hand and “Oh, please”?

  “Thanks for asking me, Danny, but I can’t. I’ll see you later, okay.” I tried to walk past him, but he sidestepped and blocked me.

  “Yeah, but hey, why, Grace? You seeing somebody?”

  He smelled like milk one day past good.

  “I know you’re not seeing the big boss man upstairs bec
ause you can’t give it to him the way he likes it, if you know what I mean.” He thrust his bony hips, and I stepped back. “But hey, ha-ha, butt, maybe you’re giving it to the other boss man, the redheaded one? Is that why you won’t go out with me, Grace? You and Mr. B getting it on?”

  I walked past him without answering. I was my mother’s child after all, and we didn’t waste our time entertaining village trash.

  Chapter 33

  I heard voices before I rang the Bruckners’ bell. Sol’s and Miriam’s and others, loud laughter and silverware against plates. It was Nancy who opened the door.

  “Grace, darling, long time no see. How are you?”

  “Hi, Nancy. Good, thanks.” She leaned and kissed me somewhere between my cheek and my lips, managing to hit and miss both at the same time.

  She’d been drinking. I walked down the long hall behind her and came to the dining table under the sunflower clock. Sol sat next to Miriam massaging the bare, swollen foot she had propped in his lap; Susannah looked beautiful and deathly pale in a white cotton top that showed off her skinny arms and sharp clavicles. Michael looked tired. Dave’s hair was a fuzzy mess, still in the cane rows.

  Nancy put her hand on my back and presented me to the table. “Amazing Grace is here.”

  I said hello to everyone and hi to Dave, whom I hadn’t seen since our trip two weeks earlier. He winked at me and smiled. “Are you coming up this week?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh, come on up, Grace.”

  “Okay, maybe Wednesday.”

  “I’ll expect you on Wednesday, then.”

  “Hey, Grace-before-meals,” Sol said, “have some wine with us.”

  “No thanks, Sol.”

  “Oh, come on, Grace.” Nancy picked up a bottle and started to pour red wine into one of Miriam’s fancy gold-rimmed goblets. “We’re having a soiree.”

  “Don’t force her, Nancy,” Miriam said. “Grace is shy.”