THE BLACKNESS STARING Deucie in the face told her that it was nighttime again. She’d slept the day away down here and now she sat up thinking that she might never leave this cellar. Had the thought that she should rummage through the boxes and find swatches of clothes that she could spread out for her dying bed. She didn’t want to die at Byberry State Hospital. She wasn’t crazy anyhow, had never been crazy, just made a spectacle of herself from time to time when a headache came on. And that was her main concern now, that a headache would come on as she was trying to get back downtown, and there she’d be all over again treated to a trip to Byberry with their arm restraints and rubber rooms and hypodermic needles that were supposed to mainline her to sanity.
“Awl, Luther,” she whispered, “it might not work out for me to get back to you, baby boy. I’ma try. But it may not happen.”
She pulled her frail, naked self to standing. Held on to the wall and inched to the back of the cellar. She used the drain as a toilet, then walked to the spigot and turned it to get the water running. She squatted under the gush of water and let it run down her back, turned then to douse her front, using her hands to rinse where the water didn’t flow. The water was neither hot nor cold, so it wasn’t shocking against her skin. A placid feel it had and she felt herself coming back to life some. Felt now what she hadn’t felt in weeks as she stood there dripping water and looking out into the yard where drizzles of light fell. She watched a gray-and-white cat on the ledge just outside the window above her head. Felt hungry right now as she watched the cat turn its back on a bowl of food and walk into a little wooden cat house. Got to be a man cat, she thought, probably got bowls he eats from all over the place. She’d eaten cat food before. Both the dry kind from a bag and the chunks that came from a can and looked to be covered in slime. It all went down good though when her circumstances dictated that that’s what she’d eat. Her trusty step stool of a wooden pony was patient under the window from when she’d cleared the cobwebs earlier. A laugh crackled up from her throat as she climbed onto the pony’s back and thought about how she’d swiped away at the cobwebs as a gift for the people who lived here. Now her gift had boomeranged and she would be the primary beneficiary. “Ain’t that just like life,” she whispered as she braced herself for several tries of pulling at the window latch, thinking the latch, like the spigot, was stuck in place from lack of use. It wasn’t though, and the ease with which the window lock turned was so out of proportion to her use of force that the pony almost tipped backward. She steadied herself and hoisted her body all the way onto the ledge in case the window was more stubborn. It was. It took her several tries before she heard the grunt of air and felt the window rising. It was a cool night for July and the air sizzled against her face, wet from a combination of her makeshift shower and the perspiration from working so hard to raise the window. She was tempted to just climb all the way through the window and out of this cellar and head on home to Luther. She reminded herself that she was naked, and wet. Might catch a cold. She laughed at the irony. Her cirrhosis was in the advanced stage; her prognosis a month ago had been that she’d last weeks rather than months, and here she was, worried about catching a cold.
She reached out of the window and retrieved the bowl filled with cat food. Could see from this vantage point that a Cyclone fence surrounded the concrete backyard. Would be too emotionally draining to try to leave through the yard and then discover that the fence had her locked in. She watched the cat slip out of the yard under the space at the bottom of the fence. She was small these days, but not that small, she thought. The smell of fish wafted up from the bowl and pulled her attention to her meal. This was the canned kind. Good. She didn’t have to work so hard to chew the kind that came out of a can. She settled in on the ledge and enjoyed the night air flowing in through the opened window. She ate with her fingers, licked them between bites as if she was eating filet mignon and the gravy drippings were that good.
She thought about her childhood now, which had been filled with rich gravies and thick cuts of meat, real satin ribbons for the ends of her plaits.
She grew up the pretty daddy’s girl to a hardworking stevedore who made a good living before he started losing toes to sugar. Deucie’s heart would drop lower in her chest as the gauze wrapped around his perpetually elevated foot grew thicker, the brown stains seeping through the gauze more intense, the gauze moving higher and higher up his leg until one day there was no leg to elevate. He’d cry out in pain and Deucie, hysterical herself, would ask him what could she do, please let her do something to take away his pain. “Rub Daddy’s leg, Deucie,” he’d cry, pointing to the empty space where his leg once was, “please, please, rub Daddy’s leg.” She’d get down on her knees and caress the air, she’d lightly stroke the air and ask him if it was better, was she making his leg all better again.
As much as Deucie was devoted to her father, she despised her own mother. Deucie blamed her mother for her father’s demise. Thought that if her mother hadn’t always demanded a lace something this, or pearl-studded that, he wouldn’t have had to work so many hours at the waterfront, causing him to lose his leg. Had it confirmed when her father was in his last days and Deucie caught her mother swinging hands with a big-shouldered merchant marine up on Broad Street. Deucie went for her mother’s throat that night, called her a conniving, murdering bitch. Shortly after the father’s death Deucie was sent to live with a distant cousin in New Jersey. Though the mother blamed it on the Depression, explained to Deucie that the war bonds the father had left were worthless and at least the cousin worked a small farm so that Deucie could subsist on corn and tomatoes, but life in Philadelphia would hardly yield even that, Deucie knew that her mother was lying, knew she just wanted Deucie out of the way so that she could lay up with her merchant marine in peace.
Deucie was sixteen by then and she hated Jersey, hated the wide-open spaces and the sounds of crickets at night and the way the air always smelled like horse shit. She hated the cousin too, a poppy-eyed half-white girl who followed Deucie’s every move as if Deucie wanted to sleep with her husband. Deucie didn’t want the husband, told him so every Friday night when he’d get drunk from moonshine and proposition her. She slept with a switchblade under her pillow should he try to creep in her room at night. Rolled over on the switchblade one night, snapping it open and gashing her lovely face. Decided this was no way to live and ran away from that farm, hitchhiked back to Philly with a red-complexioned man named Jeffery. Jeffery was short but had the most well-defined arms she’d ever seen. And though he didn’t seem to be too smart—he’d stare blankly when Deucie made a joke and after a pause his eyes would light up and he’d let go with a gawking laugh and say, “I get it”—he was charming in a boyish way, good looking, with well-cut features, and could move on the dance floor like Bojangles. His stepmother, Pat, ran an all-night speakeasy in South Philly. Deucie got drunk for the first time that night and fell in love with Jeffery. She experienced her first headache that night too, which was preceded by an intense bombardment of smells: the chitterlings and potato salad that Pat sold for fifty cents a plate, the cherries that she’d jam into the flasks of mixed drinks that were more water than alcohol, the sweat pouring from the bodies slapping around on the beds upstairs; Deucie could even smell that right before the headache unrolled itself in thunderclaps that disabled her completely. All she could do was get naked and curl up in a ball and moan out for her father since she wholly hated her mother by then.
SHE EMPTIED THE bowl of cat food and belched. She slid the bowl back out of the window and curled up on the oversize window ledge. She heard the sigh of the floor above her head. Someone had just come in through the front door. Shortly there was the prolonged squeal of water flowing through the pipes and the hot-water heater down here replenishing, which she guessed meant someone was taking a long bath. Then she could hear the faint but recognizable singing voices of the Temptations sifting through the basement ceiling. Later more footsteps, faster, lighter footsteps crunching on the porch. Then much later, heavier stomps on the porch, a hesitation about those. Deucie rightly guessed that it was the wife-mother, the daughter, the father-husband coming home, in that order. Only here twenty-four hours, she thought, and already accustomed to the sounds.
JOE DIDN’T GET home until after eleven though he’d told Louise he’d be straight in when he got off at six. Coming straight in had been his intention at six o’clock when the shift changed at his station at Fifty-sixth and Market where he worked as a commuter engineer. A glorified cashier, he called what he did. Collected fares and hit the button to make the turnstiles move. Made small talk with the regulars about the Phillies or the Black Revolution. “Hey, man, when we taking this shit over,” he’d greet the Huey Newton impersonators dressed head to toe in black or the Rap Brown wannabes wearing sunglasses at night. He’d flirt with the women, occasionally allowing one or two to ride for free. “Baby, you go ahead on through, you looking too good to pay,” he’d tease. He’d say polite “how do yous” to the elderly and make jokes with the little kids.
This evening he left work in good form, felt so unwound, so loose and energetic because he had money in his pocket and tomorrow was a day off. Was going to suggest to Louise that maybe they go out for dinner, Chinatown maybe, tonight. He and Louise could walk through Center City after they ate and allow the night air to make them feel young and in love. He headed up Market Street in the direction of the sun hanging in the back of the sky as if it had no intention of setting tonight. People were out and about and Joe called, “Hey now,” every so often as he walked. For all of the talk of how the neighborhood was going down, Joe took it as a bright sign that the streets were bustling at six on a Saturday evening. As long as people were getting together outside their houses, talking and relating and bonding, this area would stay desirable. Knew his block of Cecil Street would. Thought his block quicksanded in all that was good about the previous decade because of the way they leaned on one another. The way they’d take up donations for whoever on the block was in the midst of a money crisis, or prepared enough food to serve a two-hundred-person repast when somebody died. They streamed in to visit the hospitalized; fed each other’s children bologna and cheese sandwiches and got them started on their homework for whoever was late getting home; crowded auditoriums for school awards nights whether or not their own child was a recipient. They were tight. And though personalities sometimes erupted like a case of German measles, and they’d divide into cliques and stop speaking for a couple of days because somebody’s child dripped cherry-water ice and attracted flies to somebody’s front that had just been hosed down with bleach and water, Joe thought his block of Cecil Street a storybook of what community meant—of life wrought with the struggles of being black in Philadelphia in 1969. But because they had Cecil Street to greet them at the start and end of each day, it was, in Joe’s mind, a good life, a desirable life. He’d chosen well, he told himself now as he turned from Market onto Fifty-seventh.
He’d grown up in Pittsburgh, one of two. Left there as soon as he could because by the time he was seventeen he’d lost everything a young man could. Lost his father, though he couldn’t prove it, for being pegged a “smart-ass nigger” by a flat-footed Pittsburgh cop. His father was found in a field a mile from their house with a single bullet to his head a day after he had stepped to the cop for his comments about his wife, “…titties looking like they dripping milk. Wish I had me a cup,” the flatfoot had said to Joe’s mother. Then Joe lost his best friend to a gang war, his older sister in a car wreck, and his mother; he guessed she really died of a broken heart. So he left Pittsburgh at seventeen with the only thing that still mattered. His horn. He’d been given the horn by an old-timer who’d hung with his father, Mr. Tyne. At the repast for Joe’s father, Mr. Tyne had pulled Joe outside, away from all the women in his house that day clutching at him, trying to console him, trying to feed him hot buttered yeast rolls or smothered chops. Joe walked under Mr. Tyne’s hand as he held Joe’s shoulder as if it was the curve of his cane. “Boy, I got something that’s gonna help you make it through,” he said as he led Joe to his wagon and lifted a blanket and handed him the horn. “I’ll show you the basics, and you can add to it ’cause you smart, boy, like your daddy always bragged. This’ll help you keep on living when you don’t see the sense in life, ’cause as long as you blowing, you breathin’. You keep on breathing and the sense you need to make outta things come to you in the by-and-by.”
Joe was seeing that first horn. Now he was back to thinking about the mass of feelings that had stormed up in his chest when he’d looked at his horn last night, feelings that he hadn’t begun to unwrap because of the knife edges they seemed to bear. He told himself now that choosing Louise over life on the road with his horn had been the best choice a man could make. Settling down in Philadelphia on his block of Cecil Street which was almost enchanting to walk through was a treasure-filled choice. He stomped his foot at the corner of Chestnut and Fifty-seventh as if to confirm that, settle it once and for all that he was a happy man, a fulfilled man. And then he saw Valadean.
Actually he didn’t see Valadean, he heard her at first as she grew his monosyllabic name to two distinct, perfumed exhalations. “Jo-wo,” she called him, right as he was facing Yock’s Sandwichville that boasted the world’s thickest milk shakes. And that’s how her voice sounded right then, milky, and slow moving with that southern drawl. She was right up on him when he turned around, so close that they were breathing in the same inch of air, electrically charged air, Joe thought as he extended his hand and then stepped back half a foot so that it didn’t seem as if he was trying to reach out and feel her instead of shake her hand.
“I’m so relieved I ran into you,” she said as she allowed Joe to hold on to her hand. “I seem to have gotten myself turned around trying to get to Lit Brothers on Sixty-ninth Street. Aunt Johnetta said the D bus would be easiest but the el would be quickest, and I guess I’m caught between easy and quick right now, might as well have settled for hard and slow ’cause I’m lost sure ’nuff, Jo-wo.”
Joe squeezed her hand, then released it. He let his smile take its time forming as he focused in on her lips, what her lips were doing as she added length to his name. He didn’t even say anything at first, moved beyond her lips and took in all of her. He liked that she wasn’t self-conscious the way some women were when they were being looked at, admired. He thought she was actually guiding him by the way she touched the chocolate, flawless skin of her forehead, then smoothed her hand over her hair, pulled back in an Afro puff behind a hot pink headband, then dusted her off-the-shoulder cotton top, a loose-fitting top but short, so that it barely covered the space where her waistline dented in, where she rested her hand now, her fingers dipping, inviting a glance at the dramatic curve her hips made. She bent her leg to adjust her sandal strap along her heel, showing off her legs, big, like her thighs, big and tight and brown, rendering the pink shorts she wore almost red. When he got to the toenails painted pink like the shorts, there was nowhere else to go so he pulled his eyes back again to her face, her lips. Almost felt as if he should thank her for the guided tour. Laughed instead. Said, “Valadean, consider yourself turned around no more. I’ll not only escort you to the el, I’ll make sure you ride for free this evening.”
She was headed to get stockings for church tomorrow, she told him as they walked. Said that Johnetta had insisted on going with her to the store, but she was emphatic that the only way to learn the area was to strike out on her own. “Though honestly, Jo-wo,” she said, “I’m downright suffocating on Aunt Johnetta’s stories. When I first got here, all I heard was Alberta is the devil. Now all the talk has to do with some strange woman who came onto the block and never left. You hear tell of her yet, Jo-wo? Aunt Johnetta insists she got something to do with your next-door neighbor.”
Joe grimaced. If there was one thing he did not like about Cecil Street it was the treatment Alberta had suffered from the block once she’d converted to a religion that didn’t have a name. Though Joe believed like the rest that Alberta had been emotionally exploited by the suave, good-looking preacher who used to proselytize from his makeshift pulpit outside of the State store at Sixtieth and Locust, he didn’t think Alberta hardhearted and evil. Thought just the opposite. He had seen when Neet was a baby how Alberta’s face would cloud up after she’d reluctantly peel Neet from her arms to hand her over the porch banister so that Neet and Shay could play together. Alberta would rub her hands up and down her arms, as if she was suddenly chilled. As if she needed her baby’s body against her to keep her warm. Needy and soft, he thought Alberta, so he hadn’t been as shocked as everyone else when Alberta had fallen for the esoteric religion and begun snubbing them all.
“What do you say about Alberta, Jo-wo?” Valadean asked.
“I say that she’s at least bold enough to live the life she chose without conforming to what Cecil Street thinks, that’s not the worst trait a person could have. I say like my boys the Isley Brothers, you know, if it’s your thing, you gotta do what you gotta do, I’m surely not the one to be trying to tell anybody who to sock it to.”
They laughed as they walked up the el steps and Joe pulled Valadean’s hand so that they could run because the el was coming into the station. His man in the booth nodded and hit the lever so that Joe and Valadean could push through the turnstiles. Joe hadn’t intended getting on the el with Valadean, was his intention just to walk her up to the platform headed west. But the station was somewhat crowded and he allowed himself to be pushed into the car when the train stopped and the swell of people converged around the opening doors. Plus, he considered it the neighborly thing to do. Valadean was obviously confused finding her way around in the city. Was thinking that’s how he’d explain it to Louise should word get back that he was riding the el with some fine, well-built dream of a woman. Just being a good neighbor, he convinced himself as he showed Valadean how to grab the poles so that she could make it to a seat without falling, unaccustomed as she was to the jerky motion as the train shook from side to side. He stood rather than sliding in next to her. Looked around the train and whistled, trying not to appear as if he was looking for someone who’d be quick to run to Louise and say, Guess who I saw riding the westbound el at six-fifteen with some young girl? Relaxed when he saw that people on this car were people he knew only vaguely. Chided himself now for even looking around him, reminding himself that he was doing absolutely nothing wrong. Asked himself why he should have to feel the need to explain himself to Louise anyhow. He was her husband, not her kid. He slid into the seat next to Valadean then. Asked Valadean if this was her first time on an el as he settled in and let the side-to-side motion push their bodies closer and closer and by the time they got to Sixty-ninth Street, Joe was inviting her out for a drink.
NEET AND SHAY were in the next car of the el. They didn’t get off at Sixty-ninth Street even though it was the end of the line. They were going to ride back down to the eastern end of the line and then back to Sixty-ninth again. BB’s daughter, Sondra, told Neet she should ride the el as much as possible between now and a week from now when she’d set up the procedure with her mother. Sondra told Neet that sometimes, if it was early enough, continuous rides on a bumpy el could wash the whole thing down and negate Neet’s even having to go through the procedure. Shay said that she thought that was just an old wives’ tale. Shay and Sondra had never been fond of each other and were always looking for a reason to disagree. But Neet said what harm could it do and it might even help. So they planned to spend this Saturday evening riding the el back and forth from Sixty-ninth to Frankford, eating soft pretzels and talking about the people getting on and off the el.
The train emptied at Sixty-ninth Street its mixed bag of riders: working-class middle-aged white people trying to get out of Philly before the sun went down; young mothers wrestling with tired children on a Saturday evening, headed to Buster Brown for new shoes for church; long-haired hippies weighted down with peace-sign medallions who’d pretended all day long as they’d grooved in the grass out in Fairmount Park not to be from the suburbs. The sounds of the Fifth Dimension singing “Aquarius” drifted in through the opened doors and ushered in a new wave of commuters, mostly black people loaded down with bags from Lit Brothers and JC Pen-ney, towing children stained with mustard, no doubt from hot dogs that had slipped through the roll. The conductor came through and roused a drunk sitting not far from Neet and Shay, told him to take what was left of his vodka and get off the train, or come up with the fare to ride it back downtown. He didn’t bother Neet and Shay though as they sat side by side chattering away, interrupting themselves to say hello as he passed. They had the looks of nice, well-raised girls with their polite smiles and carefully ironed clothes. Shay’s Afro was big, but freshly trimmed and neat looking; Neet wore granny glasses, her semibush barely passing because her hair was so straight. They were talking about whether hippies could be trusted to get involved in black causes. Shay said no way. Said she believed like her dad that a lot of them were CIA meant to thwart any real change to the establishment. Neet said that a half dozen long-haired, raggedy-jean, torn-flag-adorned white boys and girls had come into Connie’s Cards ’n Gifts earlier and bought a full fifty dollars’ worth of cards and posters and gushed the whole time to her and Connie about how they were down with progress for the people. “So Miss Connie told them that the house next door to her was for sale, why didn’t they move on her block and live where she lived and help us progress from inside out. And they were all, like, ‘Cool, man, I could dig that.’ And after they left, Miss Connie said they were probably high off of acid.”
“Probably were tripping,” Shay said.
“I don’t know,” Neet said, turning to look out of the window. “They did spend a lot of money in there. I thought they were sincere.”
“Neet, you think everybody’s sincere.”
Neet was about to go into her routine of you wanna know sincere, I’ll tell you about sincere, and detail for Shay the aberrant devotion of the congregation to her mother’s pastor and church. From a little girl she would have Shay in stitches when she’d perform one-person skits about the bizarre scenes at her church. Was about to go into one now, feeling the need to make Shay laugh after their devastating time on the porch banister this morning when they both allowed themselves to admit that Neet was pregnant. But right then Neet saw Valadean walking along the platform.
“Look,” she said, pointing out the window, “there goes Miss Johnetta’s niece. Gosh, she’s pretty.”
“But she knows it,” Shay said, dusting away at the salt falling from the soft pretzel she’d bitten into. “Takes away from the prettiness when somebody’s yelling out, ‘Look at me, I’m beautiful.’”
“Well, we do it with black is beautiful,” Neet said, patting Shay’s ’fro.
“That’s only ’cause our beauty’s been denied, we’ve been told we’re ugly for so long, we have to shout out that it’s not true.”
“Well, maybe somebody told Miss Johnetta’s niece she was ugly growing up, so now she’s saying, ‘You a lie, I look good.’”
“She does look good,” Shay had to agree. “Matching from head to toe too in all that hot pink.” Shay was about to go on and say that Valadean probably had every man in her el car ogling her, but right then she saw her father walking along the platform, saw Valadean turn to wait for him to catch up.
“Look, there’s your dad,” Neet said. “Mr. Joe, Mr. Joe,” Neet called but the doors to the el had just closed, so Joe didn’t hear her. The el started moving in reverse then, toward Center City, so they were riding backward, which was actually putting them closer and closer to Joe and Valadean. Shay had a clear view of her father’s face, his smile, his eyebrows arched as if he’d just asked Valadean a soft and serious question. He reached out then and touched Valadean’s back and pointed her toward the revolving wooden slatted doors that were the exit from the platform. His hand seemed to move in slow motion to Shay, seemed not just to lightly touch Valadean’s back but seemed to caress it, and when Valadean turned around to look in Joe’s face, to smile back at him, it seemed to Shay as if they had leaned in and kissed.
Neet pushed over Shay to try and tap the window to get Joe’s attention. “Aren’t you gonna wave to him?” she asked Shay. “Mr. Joe, Mr. Joe,” Neet said, hitting the window with her fist.
“Stop it, girl!” Shay said, trying to pull Neet’s hand away from the window. “Just stop it. I don’t want him to see me.”
The el had picked up speed and rounded a curve and left the sight of Joe and Valadean behind.
“What’s wrong with him seeing you?” Neet asked as she got up and sat in the seat facing Shay because she said that riding backward made her dizzy these days. “We have our story together, right? We made a bet to see how long it takes to get from here to Frankford, if anybody asks where we’re headed, right? So it’s not like we’d have any explaining to do, right? So why didn’t you want your dad to see you, huh?”
“Just because,” Shay said, breaking off another piece of pretzel.
“Why you being all like that?”
“Like what?” Shay asked, needing Neet to help her make sense of the what, the way they’d always done for each other.
“Like you just caught your dad wrong just ’cause he got off of the same el with Valadean?”
“Speaking of caught wrong,” Shay said, stuffing her soft pretzel back into the brown paper bag and punching her seat with the bag, “did you tell that dumb-ass Little Freddie yet about your condition?”
“Everything is everything with Little Freddie and me,” Neet said, not allowing herself to be baited right now. She stared at Shay, watched Shay’s cheeks fill up with air the way they always did when her emotions were tangled. “You should have let your father know you saw him, Shay.”
Shay didn’t say anything. Just looked out of the window. They were speeding through West Philadelphia and Shay concentrated on the roofs and chimneys of the row houses and stores and row houses again that lined Market Street. A rush of James Brown singing “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” moved through the car when the doors opened at Fifty-sixth Street along with a stream of fried shrimp wafting up from the fish store below. More loud music at Fifty-second Street, this time a little Aretha Franklin, a little Wes Montgomery competing with sirens blaring and a raspy voice shouting, “Jesus saves,” through the type of megaphone that politicians made promises through at election time. A tall, slim brother in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt sat next to Neet, said, “Hello, sister.” Neet looked at him and smiled though Shay barely acknowledged him even after Neet tried to introduce them. Neet and the brother engaged in light conversation about whether a man had really landed on the moon the other night. He said he had his doubts. Said the white man was a liar and a thief and would do anything to promote his image of superiority over the entire universe. Shay sucked the air in through her teeth. She was irritated that Neet was so nice, so trusting, so willing to give anybody the time of day, a second chance. Hated having to listen to Neet’s polite replies to this wannabe intellectual’s comments. So she was relieved when he got off at Thirty-fourth Street, especially since they were underground now and there were no more scenes for her to look out on.
Shay got up then and sat next to Neet, telling herself that it would save her from having to listen to bullshit from the next brother who’d rush to sit there, attracted by Neet’s soft prettiness. Once she sat though, she knew that she needed the very thing that irritated her about Neet, her too-trusting nature. “So how do you know my father wasn’t wrong back there?” she asked Neet.
“How do you know he was? I just think you should give him the benefit of the doubt. I swear, Shay,” Neet said as she put her arm around Shay and squeezed her shoulder. “And I don’t have to tell you what the consequences are in my mom’s religion if I were to be caught swearing.”
Neet went into one of her church routines then. Imitated the Reverend Mister who this time she characterized as a rooster, then the flutter of all the hens who pampered him, mopping his brow and fanning him lest he get overheated even as they themselves were passing out from working overtime laying his eggs. What she did with her face, her arms, even her voice as she cock-a-doodle-dooed had them both laughing so hard that they were doubled over, prompting the occasional comment from some other young black commuter begging, damn, sisters, can I get a hit of what y’all been smoking.
By the time they got to Frankford, the other end of the line, and the train emptied again, Neet had laughed so hard she was crying. She was really crying. She was telling Shay that she was afraid. She didn’t know if she could go through with the abortion. She’d gotten attached to the thickening in her stomach, she said. Had even developed the habit of rubbing her stomach softly, trying to soothe it and prepare it for the ensuing void. “Please help me, Shay. Please help me to go through with it, I have to go through with it. But I’m afraid. I’m scared. I’m so scared. I do want to have the baby, but I can’t have a baby. How can I even want to have a baby? I want college. You know. I want a future. God. I must be crazy to want a baby. Please help me, Shay.”
Shay was terror stricken herself listening to Neet cry that she did want to have the baby, even as she consoled her, told her she would get through it. “I’m here for you, girl. You know that. Don’t even let this mess with your mind. This is normal, what you’re going through. We’ll get through it. Yeah we will. Hell yeah we will.”
THEY RODE THE EL until nine o’clock, though Neet said that she didn’t feel any different so that she couldn’t tell whether or not the jostling motion had done any good. Though it had done her some good just spending time with Shay. She told Shay that now as she stepped into Shay’s vestibule so that she could put her long black skirt on to wear into her house. The baggy skirt was actually a relief to her stomach after the Wrangler dungarees she’d had on. They kissed good night, said love you, the way they’d been saying it to each other since they’d first learned to talk.
Shay stood at the door and watched Neet climb over the banister and go into her house. Now she allowed herself to fully realize the panic she’d felt at Neet’s admission that she wanted to have the baby. Her breaths were coming fast and tight and she thought she was about to hyperventilate. Suddenly she wanted to talk to her mother. Wanted to ask Louise was it right to coerce somebody into doing something that they didn’t want to do even if the thing that they didn’t want to do was the best for them. Louise would know what to do. She’d listen with a keen understanding and then direct Shay’s path through this ordeal. Her mother would interrogate her for specifics though and Shay couldn’t give specifics. Except, she thought now, she could invent a scenario. Somebody from work, she’d tell Louise. Some Irish-Catholic girl who found herself pregnant, a college student, she’d tell Louise. She felt unburdened already just thinking about talking it over with Louise.
She pushed in through the vestibule door and into the living room. The living room smelled sweet, like her mother’s Sachet of Roses perfume. The Temptations’ In a Mellow Mood fizzed softly from the stereo console. They were singing “With These Hands” as Shay called through the house for her mother. “Mommy, Mommy, I need to talk to you,” she said. “Mommy, I have to ask you something important.”
“Don’t Mommy me,” Louise said, coming out of the kitchen. Her face was tight and the bones in her slender neck were sticking out. “Don’t you dare Mommy me.”
“What did I do?” Shay said, retreating inside at the anger shooting from her mother’s face, hiding all that was pretty about it.
“You left the washer filled with your wet clothes, for starters,” Louise barked.
“Oops, sorry—”
“And you made eggs and didn’t even have the decency to soak the pan.”
“I was gonna as soon as I got back—”
“And you didn’t feed the cat.”
“Oh yes I did, I did feed the cat. I fed the cat this afternoon right before I even went out.”
“Well, why did he come to the front door crying, he never comes to the front. When I went out into the yard his bowl was completely empty.”
“I fed the cat, Mom, don’t tell me that I didn’t feed the cat.”
“When I filled the bowl, he went at that bowl like he hadn’t eaten in a week.”
“I said I fed the damn cat.”
“Who are you using profanity at?” Louise said, coming toward Shay.
Shay wished for her father right now. He had a knack of walking into the middle of an argument between Shay and Louise and with a simple remark or two having them either laughing or instead of going at each other, pitting them both against him. Now the realization pounded her over the head. Her father wasn’t home yet. She looked around the living room, the unopened bottle of wine on her mother’s good silver tray with two empty wineglasses. Her mother in her silky green robe, her hair so black and freshly pressed twisted in a French roll. Her lipstick red and new. Three hours since she’d seen her father on Sixty-ninth Street. And he hated Sixty-ninth Street. Where the fuck was he? she wondered now. She was seeing again the way he’d smiled at Valadean, the way Valadean had smiled back, her teeth so big and pretty. She was angry with him for not being home yet. Angry with Louise for slamming the window on her need to talk. Angry with Neet for convincing her that her father should get the benefit of the doubt. What kind of judgment did Neet have anyhow, Neet didn’t have judgment enough to keep from getting pregnant. She was looking at her mother now. She wished her mother would stop glaring at her like that, she looked like a dog foaming at the mouth. No wonder her father could smile with such open ease at Valadean if this was the face Louise presented when he came home.
“Gosh,” Shay said, fighting tears. “I came home really needing to talk to you and you coming at me like a fucking wild woman.”
“If I have to tell you one more time about your language,” Louise threatened, moving in closer to Shay with her hand opened, ready to go for Shay’s mouth.
“Leave me alone.” Now Shay was crying. “Just leave me alone and go get your teeth fixed.” She ran up the steps then. Stormed into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
JOE AND VALADEAN ended up at a small club on the north side where Joe didn’t know anyone, and more important, where no one knew him. The club was perfect: so packed and so dark; a nice quartet doing its thing and he and Valadean had to sit so very close. An old cat was on vocals and his voice was so smooth that it melted the air in here. Joe was getting a fine buzz from the Bombay gin and tonic water and he was listening so intently as the old cat sang “Embrace Me.” More from instinct than deliberation his fingers went to the space at the back of Valadean’s neck. She leaned her neck forward to make it easy. Joe was thinking what he would tell Louise if he was spotted right now, that he’d just popped in there for a drink and hung around for the set, is what he’d tell her. Didn’t even realize who in the hell he was sitting next to as dark and crowded as it was in there, he’d insist, he’d just squeezed in right along with everyone else. And then he even started to think about what he would say to his wife if he just went ahead and hung out with Valadean tonight, not too late, just until ten or eleven.
Nothing outrageous either, find another bar where they could sit at a table and face each other, look at her perfect smile and squeeze her fingertips, talk a little jive, tell her the effect she was having on him, and he was, after all, a married man. Follow her cue from there.
He leaned in closer and whispered in her ear that she was such a lovely, lovely lady. “Just lovely,” he said. He didn’t even consider the rightness or wrongness of his actions as he slipped his hand under her hot pink loose cotton top and rode his fingers up and down her spine. The skin that he caressed ever so lightly was soft and tight, with a hint of an oily wetness to it, and he imagined that’s how she would feel all over. “Mnh, Valadean,” he whispered. “I hope you wouldn’t think I was jiving you if I said that in all of my eighteen years of marriage I have never met a woman who I’d risk it for. But damn, girl, you risky business, you know that.”
She sipped her wine. They were sitting so close that he could smell the Bordeaux as she brought her glass down, a perfect lip print on its rim. The tenor sax was soloing now, the notes he blew out swirled around Joe, turning the texture of the melting air in here to cream. This was too large an enticement. A man shouldn’t be enticed to this degree. The music and the gin and the creamy air, the oily wetness of the skin on Valadean’s back and her lip print on the glass. Her lips moving now, calling him Jo-wo, growing his name until his name was about to burst. Much too much for a man to have on him, he thought as he decided on the Red Moon on Westminster Avenue. Clean and affordable rooms there. He leaned in and brushed Valadean’s beautiful lips with his own. Her lips were as soft as they looked, and parted easily for him too, just like he knew they would.
JOE WALKED HOME by himself. He put Valadean in a cab after they left the Red Moon Hotel. He needed to walk off the effects of her, the essence of her womanhood that hung over him fat and heavy, like pea-soup fog. The scent of her Avon perfume and Afro Sheen hairspray had been powerful and he hoped he’d rid himself of it with the sliver of packaged soap in the shower stall. Though all the soap in the city couldn’t combine to wash away the memory of the air in the club, thick with whiskey and cigarette smoke and aging men’s desires. He felt guilty and sorry right now. Guilty that he’d strayed, sorry that he was a married man anyhow. And sad. Felt the intensity of sadness that he’d felt when he’d put the mouthpiece of his horn between his lips last night. All the breaths he’d wasted over the years talking shit about nothing. Breaths that should have been transformed through his horn, the nothingness of air made into beautiful music. The nothingness of his life given a fine purpose in the notes he blew. He wanted now to resurrect those dead breaths, call them back to life one at a time beginning with the last time he’d played. But that was too big a want, an unhaveable want. So he felt justified now in allowing himself a smaller want. Valadean. She was a minuscule want in comparison to having his breaths back. She was here and now and easy and soft. She was doable, with no history. A willing distraction that he didn’t even have to work for. Just take her to a cheap hotel and say distract me, baby, make me forget that I was once young, with dreams.
By the time he got to Cecil Street he had justified his guilt all the way to the edges of his conscious mind. Filled in the spaces left by his retreating guilt with the knowledge that he wasn’t going to leave, no intention of breaking up his home, of hurting his wife and daughter. He forced himself to whistle as he stepped into the vestibule and fixed his face for the lie he would tell. Stopped at Tim’s for a cut and ended up in Pinochle Eddie’s basement caught in a marathon of a tournament. He wouldn’t have to worry about Louise checking up on him, that had never been her style. Louise had class, he thought as he pushed open the door into the living room.
She was sitting on the couch, her hair pinned up the way he liked it, dressed in the emerald green silky robe he’d given her for her birthday. He tried not to notice the wine on the tray, the two glasses, the opened hi-fi. High fidelity, isn’t that what hi-fi stood for, he asked himself now even as he tried not to remember that she generally didn’t turn it on. Her perfume was heavy through the room and he knew how methodical she was, knew she had worked to create this romantic mood. She was looking straight at him with that hard, cold stare she could give so effectively. He wished her stare wasn’t so chilling. Wished she hadn’t looked at him like that the night he’d played his horn in ’54 when all of Cecil Street went wild because his playing had been so ferocious. He went to her now and kissed her cheek. Said, “Whew, sorry I’m late, baby. Got caught in a never-ending game in Eddie’s basement.”
Louise didn’t challenge his explanation of the pinochle game. Knew for a fact that he’d been caught in games like that before. Plus, he appeared so calm as he stood over her. She looked straight into his calmness, at the bright light it generated that had the effect of high beams in her face, blinding her to the heavy bag he dragged into the house that contained the truth of his whereabouts. She got up from the couch and turned off the hi-fi and went upstairs. She shook herself from the robe and dressed her nakedness in cotton pajamas and got under the covers. By the time Joe came upstairs and got into bed, the bag he’d dragged into the house had expanded and took up the space between them. It was like a mountain in the bed between them.