HAD NATHAN, THE blanched-colored man who’d just left Nan’s house looking for Neena, known where he was going, he would have parked at the other end of the block, and in doing so would have run right into Neena.
A sitting duck Neena was the way she was glued to the corner this morning, unable to continue up the block to Nan’s house. Needed a rock hard stomach to say, Nan, things have happened and I need a place to stay for a night or two. Her stomach was tender though. Her entire self was. This being February for her too. Missing Freeda too.
Her real intention anyhow had been to go to Tish’s house, but Tish had moved recently to a redone Victorian somewhere in historically certified Overbrook Farms and the new address was in the condo where Neena had been living in Chicago. The unit padlocked the day before by the man who owned it. Luckily Tish’s cell phone number had not changed and Neena had been calling Tish since then. Had even tried to reach Goldie at her assisted-living facility, but was told that Goldie was part of a group sickened on a bus trip to the casinos and the group was under quarantine for the next several days. Finally yesterday evening, a live voice answered Tish’s phone. Neena was unaware that Tish’s cell phone calls had been transferred to her home phone, and that Nan was there, so Neena ended up speaking to Nan—the absolute last person she wanted to speak to. Worse still, she learned that her sister was threatening to miscarry.
Since Goldie and Tish were it for Neena in the way of help: no girlfriends, no extended family with whom she was close enough to call; she lumbered here to ask her grandmother for help. But now she faltered. She’d only gotten this close to Nan’s house because of what the man she’d met last night had said to her about a living bridge. Neena always in the state of having just met a man. Nice men mostly, married with pretty wives and reputations to protect; the soft-type man who’d been close to his mother making it easy for Neena to fake adoration, making him quick to pay when she’d shake him down in the end. That’s how she’d supported her nomadic lifestyle as she hopscotched from city to city tracking down dead-end leads to her mother. Though the man who’d encouraged her here was atypical.
It was last night. She’d just landed back in Philadelphia—not landed as in a plane touching down on a runway at Philly International, landed as in body and soul hitting the ground at the end of a nosedive. Eighteen hours prior she’d returned to the Chicago condo from a trip to San Francisco, an ophthalmology convention where her eye-doctor boyfriend Cade was receiving a humanitarian award for his work with seniors. Cade’s wife had decided to accompany him at the last minute and when Neena said, Not a problem, that she would just hang in Chicago and see him when he returned, he’d insisted that Neena come along, though on a different flight, a room arranged for her in a nearby hotel. The experience was disconcerting for Neena, meant that Cade was getting careless. Decided to end it with him that weekend over dinner at McCormick & Schmick’s while his wife enjoyed a ladies-night boat ride up the San Francisco Bay.
She manufactured tears and dangled him the line that had garnered her payoffs other times: that an ex-boyfriend had gotten into her apartment and hidden a camera in her bedroom and wanted ten thousand dollars to keep the pictures of their naked selves off the Internet. Cade was eating lobster tails and his lips were glistening from the butter sauce, thin lips, and it suddenly occurred to Neena that lips that thin on a black person meant that he was stingy. Plus he was red-complexioned and her grandmother always said that red-colored Negroes were mean. She felt a thump in the pit of her stomach as she watched the butter on his lips glaze over, lips so shiny that they reflected the candlelight and it appeared as if a rainbow had spread out over his thin lips; his skin tone so red at that moment that it was as if she was watching the sun set. Knew right then that he wasn’t going to pay. Even as he nodded, and said, “Okay, ten thousand,” woodenly, his mouth moving as if it was being controlled by a puppeteer. “I’ll get you the money, Neena, okay.”
She knew then that when she got back to Chicago she’d have to pack up what she could and head for Detroit. Though when she did return she was met in the hallway by Cade’s brother Tito, delivering to Neena a get-out-of-town-by-sundown message. Said what he ought to do to her for trying to extort money from his brother. Said he ought to make like her face was a frozen-over lake and he was an ice fisher trying to get at a silver trout. The threat scared Neena and she didn’t scare easily. That he’d been so descriptive meant to her that he’d actually visualized himself slashing through the skin on her face. And she had a nice face. Not classically beautiful but odd in a way that was hard and soft and sultry with its asymmetrical arrangement as if her features had been shaped more for artistic interest than for prettiness with the heavy severe eyes and the gushy smile, the molded cheekbones, the subtly formed nose. Shaken, she’d asked if she could just get into the apartment for a few things, personal things.
A half laugh was Tito’s response, not unlike the heater man’s half laugh all those years ago when Neena had asked him if they could work something out in exchange for his getting the heater going. This Tito was even more of a bottom feeder, a nonaccomplished slot-machine addict who humped off of his brother’s success. Collected a nice paycheck for a couple of hours a week of shuttling Cade’s half-blind elderly patients to and from appointments. He touched Neena’s face; he had soft hands like his brother Cade had soft hands. Neena remembered suddenly stories she’d heard about her grandfather’s hands, Freeda’s father. He’d been a stevedore on the waterfront and all that manual labor had left his hands callused and rough as tree bark. But they were magic hands, Freeda used to tell Neena, when he pinched your cheek, or touched the center of your forehead with his thumb, or swung your hand inside of his on the way to get cherry water ice, all you felt was the softness, as if his inside goodness came out through his hands. Neena thought that this one’s hands were the antithesis of her grandfather’s. This one’s hands had the feel of his inside meanness, felt as if a steel wool pad stroked her face right now.
The people who lived across the hall from Neena were having dinner. An older couple, refined, the husband a retired anthropology professor, the wife a botanist. Neena could hear the gentle tinkle of metal against glass coming from their apartment. Nancy Wilson singing “You’ve Changed” floated into the hallway on air weighted with the aroma of baked manicotti. Neena willed them not to look through their peephole. She’d told them that she was a student at Harold Washington College majoring in political science. Believable enough since was always taking a course albeit noncredit somewhere or another. Always with a book or two protruding from her bag. Right now her tote held A Short History of Nearly Everything that she’d been reading on the plane ride back from San Francisco. Couldn’t stand the shame of what she really was: a failed daughter who hustled married men.
Tito’s soft, rough hands pulled at the silk scarf atop her coat. She thought she might vomit though she swallowed hard and told herself to just do what she had to do to get into the apartment and at least scoop up her jewelry, pictures of her and Tish with Freeda when Freeda was happy. She knew without having yet checked that the credit cards Cade had opened for her would be dead now, the bank accounts that he’d controlled where she’d foolishly put money that was legitimately hers; her cell phone too she was sure would be without service.
Tito’s fingers rubbed her neck, making circles toward her throat as he drew his boxy face toward hers to kiss her. She tried to tell him that they should go inside, but the sound that came out of her was more like a screeching half cry, followed by three short gags.
He pushed at her shoulder then. “What’s that about?” he asked, his voice ricocheting from one side of the hall to the other. “You trying to say I repulse you or some shit?”
Before Neena could reply, the door opened to the apartment across the hall. The couple stood there side by side, she in a black velour lounging set dabbing her lips with a white cotton napkin, he in brown corduroys and a tan sweater. They looked like someone’s concerned mother and father. They were childless, Neena knew, and now she thought what excellent parents they would have made. Wished right now that they were her parents, even as she wished that the floor beneath her would give way so that she wouldn’t have to stand here so filled with shame in the path of their concern.
She forced a smile. “Evening,” she said, then turned and started down the hall. Walked away from the contents of that apartment just like that. All those things: the gold and silver, the leather and cashmere and silk; the designer’s name stamped or etched or sewn or painted on the label or lining, the strap or flap or sole. The accumulations of a lifetime. Pathetic when she thought about it.
She didn’t know if Tito would follow her so once she was out on the street she started to run. Ran all the way to the bus station. Found an old debit card in the back of her purse from a bank in Newark with a $183 balance. That would more than get her to Detroit. Except that when the ticket agent smiled and asked where was the pretty lady headed, and she looked at his eyebrows, eyebrows like Mr. Cook’s who used to own the store at the corner of Nan’s block, Detroit never came out of her mouth. “Philly,” she said instead. “I’m headed home to Philly.”
She felt like such a cliché sitting on the bus, sweating in her black-on-black designer garb, her overpriced knee-high boots, her leather bag. Kept hearing the Lou Rawls song about living double in a world of trouble as she rocked herself the whole bus ride, telling herself not to cry. She rarely cried.
It was snowing when the bus pulled into the Philadelphia station at Tenth and Filbert. About seven at night and Neena was glad for the snow. Always thought that the snow softened the city. Made Philadelphia feel charming and safe like a storybook of a town where every house had an unlocked door and a frolicking spotted pet dog.
Bow Peep, the man who would talk Neena into going to Nan’s, thought a similar thing about a nighttime snow in Philly as he stood outside of the bus station and scanned the faces. A street corner musician, a flutist, he mostly fancied himself a prophet-type healer. Looked like a prophet right then with his long woolly hair and leather sandals like Jesus wore. Strapped on the sandals even on snowy days, which made him look half crazy. Though crazy, he would say, would be pulling on wool socks over the jungle rot that he’d picked up in Vietnam more than thirty years ago. The snow’s cold wetness was wonderful against his feet as he pushed his trained breath through his flute and competed against the wide swaths of city sounds, the car horns and road rage–type cursing and loud talking in dialects from highbrow to hip-hop. He didn’t mind that he was generally ignored out here. Understood that most prophets had low approval ratings in their own lands. And anyhow there was the occasional audience ripe for a prophet encounter who’d stop and stand in front of him. So he played against the elements. Played “Tenderly” as the oblivious people rushed past. And here she was, an audience stopping to listen. She was under forty-young, he guessed. Odd-looking in a pretty way with wild fluffy hair and features that stopped short of too prominent. He bent way back to hit a high note and tried to send her a healing vibe through the music, then pulled his flute from his mouth and asked what was her name.
“Neena,” she said. She reached into her purse and pulled up a five-dollar bill. Broke as she was, she was still touched by how hard he was working out here so she let the money flutter down into the faded green, snow-speckled lining of his flute case.
“Well it’s gonna be all right in a minute, Neena.”
“Yeah?” she said. “Define minute.”
He was about to talk about the relativity of time and circumstance but now here was Cliff in front of him, his like-a-brother homey from way back reaming him out about being out here in the snow without proper foot gear. He didn’t tell Cliff his rudeness was disrupting a transformation in the early stages. The first stage was always the stopping to listen the way this young lamb just had, meant that the receptivity was already in place. Trying to explain that to Cliff would mean an interrogation about his meds. Instead he introduced them. “Neena, please meet the finest civil rights attorney in all of Philadelphia, and the best friend the universe could ever bestow on a naked-toed musician such as me.”
“Neena,” Cliff said, extending his hand, looking beyond Neena. His attention pulled to the other side of the street. Neena shook his hand, sizing him up the way she’d been sizing men up since the heater man in the basement. This one in a nice cashmere coat, meticulously shaved mustache, strong features though incredibly sad eyes. She looked away from his eyes, had a weakness for men with sad eyes that she guessed she’d inherited from her mother.
She looked down at his hands. “You should have on gloves,” she said.
“I don’t need them. I’ve got tough hands,” he answered, as he turned his attention from the other side of the street. He started to say something about tough hands meaning a tender heart but stopped himself. Too much of a line; too true for him these days given the situation between him and his wife. The situation unnamed, just an unsettled murkiness between them.
More out of habit than the desire to know him more, Neena asked Cliff for a card. He reached beneath his coat into his breast pocket. “You haven’t been denied access because of your race or gender lately, have you?” he asked, trying to make a joke.
“Not tonight, but the night is young,” she said as she fingered the card, and then slipped it into her purse heavy with the weight of the dead—dead cell phone, dead credit cards, dead checkbook. She smiled at Cliff, thanked Bow Peep for the music, then hurried off.
She was still posttraumatic from her encounter with Tito and for a second she thought that she saw him in her peripheral vision. Told herself that she was being silly as she tried to lose herself in the crush of the after-work foot traffic, looking around for a pay phone to try again to reach Tish.
She was on Broad Street in front of the Ritz-Carlton that used to be a bank. She approached the coated Ritz-Carlton doorman, slipped under the oversized umbrella he held, and smiled her gushy smile, and when he smiled back and said, Ma’am, good evening, she went into a story of having just left her cell phone in a friend’s car. Could she please use his to make a thirty-second call. He glanced at her hand and she went down into her purse, found a single dollar bill, and pressed it in his mammoth hand, thinking with hands that large he needed to be playing football instead of opening doors for thankless people to come and go and taking her needed dollar when his minutes were probably free anyhow. She sat on the bench and held her breath and dialed Tish’s number. Hoped Tish and not her husband would answer. “Tish?” she said as soon as she heard the nonmale “hello” on the other end. The “hello,” though, hadn’t come from Tish. The “hello” was in that flat, airless tone. Nan’s tone. Had she dialed Nan’s number just now by mistake. No, she was sure she had not.
A pause, then, “Neena? Is this you, Neena?”
“It is, yes, Nan? How are you, Nan?”
“I’m doing, I’m doing. How are you is the question? Where are you? Are you in Philadelphia?”
“Just passing through, just wanted to say hello to Tish,” Neena said imagining that Nan’s face was opening and closing with that look of irritated relief, relieved that Neena was alive, but irritated nonetheless to have Neena’s voice pushing in her ear.
“Just passing through?” Nan asked. “Headed from where to where?”
“I’m just, just headed to a meeting for my job, a conference.” Neena tried to keep a lift to her voice.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Neena?”
A forest sprouted in Neena’s throat suddenly and blocked her reply of, yes I’m sure. She tried to push her voice through the thorny denseness, the thicket. She heard her grandmother calling her then from the other side of the trees, Nan’s voice fading in and out, an urgent voice her grandmother used that snapped the end from Neena’s name and sounded like a sharp breath. She cleared her throat. “I’m here, yes, Nan. I’m all right. I’m fine.”
“You sure? You gonna stop past so somebody can get a look at you and see for themselves if you’re all right?”
“It’s—you know, if there’s time, there’s this meeting thing—I really wanted Tish’s new address—”
“You not lying, are you?”
“About wanting Tish’s address—”
“About some meeting—”
“God, Nan, why do you always have to assume the worst about me?”
“Well, you will lie. Am I right? Your mother would run off but she—”
“God, Nan, please! I didn’t call—God, I called for Tish. May I speak to my sister, please.”
“Well, now, Neena, if you kept in touch the way you belong to do, you’d know your sister’s not well. In the hospital. Threatening to miscarry—”
“Threatening to miscarry?” The panic-driven spike in Neena’s voice drew the Ritz-Carlton doorman’s attention as he turned from helping a couple into the back of a cab and hunched his shoulder and motioned his hands to Neena in a yo what’s up with my phone kind of way. Neena signaled to him with a raised finger just a minute, then asked Nan what hospital.
“Not a good idea to tell you that, Neena—”
“What are you saying, Nan—”
“Not the best thing for Tish to be shocked by your presence all of a sudden, too hard on her in her delicate condition, she’s got enough to do to try to hold on to the baby.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this to me—”
“I can’t believe you wouldn’t have thought it already, if you thought about more than yourself sometimes and your own devilish desires—”
Neena pressed the phone off. Walked it back over to the doorman and just nodded because she couldn’t talk. He wasn’t trying to talk anyhow as he dropped the phone in his pocket and opened the door to the town car that had just pulled up. Her feet were weighted suddenly as she stood on the corner thinking about what to do. She tried to slow her breathing. Tried not to feel anything right now because anything she felt would be too imprecise, too muddled to call by a name the way a psychiatrist she’d been with said was necessary to do. Give what you’re feeling a name, he’d insisted, and then the emotion will be manageable. She started down the alphabet: afraid, blue, conflicted, deflated, effaced, fucked, was that an emotion? How about gored? Hope, she hoped with everything in her that Tish would hold on to the baby. Stuck at H now, Hate. She hated Nan. Blamed Nan for the way her mother would disappear. Abandoned the alphabet but at least her breathing was coming under control.
She started walking. Turned onto Market Street and tried to console herself with the fact that although she had no arranged place to sleep tonight, at least she’d made it here during a nighttime snow so that the city was more a silhouette; its hardness shadowed in muted outlines forming a picture pretty enough to be in a storybook. She looked up on City Hall under a coating of snow, imagined the clop, clop of horse-drawn carriages. Walked now through City Hall courtyard. Now she felt trapped in a gothic tragedy the way shadows were falling overpowering the snow. She curled her toes in her boots to keep them back from where the cold moisture seeped in as she walked closely behind a woman carrying a bag from Miss Tootsie’s gourmet soul food. The woman talking on a cell phone saying that dinner was lovely, and oh what nice portions, and she was bringing home a doggie bag good for a whole ’nother meal. Neena followed the woman down the steps to the el—often found herself following random women who looked to be about the age her mother would be, fantasizing that it was, that she’d call out “Mommy!” and Freeda would turn around and turn on that beatific smile and say Hi doll, how’s my doll baby. The fantasy scrambling like a bad cable signal when the women turned around, like this woman was doing now, warily at first, relaxing when she saw it was Neena behind her and not some purse-snatching thug, Neena having the thought that given her dire situation she could become just that, or worse. Become a she-wolf waiting for the moon to rise.
She walked the length of the platform. The el that would take her to she had no idea where was coming like a silver bullet kicking up the urine-scented air down here. She got on the el. She tried to settle into the train’s clackity motion. Looked around the el to distract herself. The assemblage of commuters dotting the seats made up an international brew that surprised Neena: Asian, African, Middle Eastern, probably a few Latinos that she guessed she was taking for black. A police woman leaned against the pole, the gun in her holster expanding her hips to plus-size. She was saying something about Fifty-second Street to an old cat in a leather Sixers bomber. Neena got an image of Fifty-second Street then, remembered when it was a bustling retail strip by day, a partygoer’s paradise by night. The devil’s trap, her grandmother called it. “You go down there on a Friday or Saturday after dark,” Nan used to say, “and the devil gonna have you in his clutches, have you doing his bidding until the day you die and you join him to burn up in hell for all eternity.”
Neena knew Nan was just trying to scare them; it had worked with Tish. Smiled now remembering how Tish wouldn’t venture onto Fifty-second Street even during the day when it was dense with normal people banking at Provident National or buying lemon pound cake from the Cookie Jar, a Baldwin novel from Hakim’s. Neena, though, walked the strip regularly in the aftermaths of her mother’s perennial disappearances, trying to find her from among the women propped on bar stools laughing with too much fervor. Her mother’s bottomed-out moods always sending her down here to grovel with people she would barely acknowledge when she was up. When she was up she’d socialize with respectable men who’d take Freeda and the girls to wholesome places like the Franklin Institute where they’d walk through the giant-sized heart. Neena’s mother telling her that whenever Neena crossed her mind, which was a thousand times a day, her heart would feel as large as the one they tiptoed through at Franklin Institute.
Suddenly Neena wanted to be on Fifty-second Street as the el pulled into the station. She got up abruptly and slid through the doors just before they closed, and walked down the steps from the platform onto a desolate stomped-to-the-ground corner that was so far from her memory of the area that she just stood there at first, gasping, feeling as if she’d just stepped across the rotting threshold into an abandoned house. Wondered how much worse it would look without the softening effects of the snow. Developers obviously hadn’t refound this part of West Philly yet, hadn’t sent the explorers, the pioneers, in to resettle the way she’d heard they were starting to do even along Ridge Avenue in North Philly. She breathed through her mouth because the corner smelled like mold. A fried chicken place across the street did little to erase the smell, but at least it sent up a cracked swath of light and she could see beyond the steel-grated building of what had been a booming Woolworth’s, up the street to a broken neon sign with only the apostrophe lit. The orange-red apostrophe soaked up the snowflakes as soon as they landed and seemed to say something possesses me, just don’t ask what. The idea of the broken sign fit so with what the area had become that Neena walked up the street and on inside.
Neighborhood bars were generally not her preference and this one appeared to have outlived its usefulness. It was warm in here at least. The light, though, was as shallow as what she’d left on the outside save circles of sky blue that bounced around an old-fashioned jukebox right now playing Otis Redding. A rail-thin bartender seemed half asleep when she walked up to the bar and asked if there was a pay phone she could use. He motioned to the back of the bar and she dug in her purse for a quarter to occupy herself so she wouldn’t appear to be looking around the bar, even though she was looking around the bar. Picked out the man wearing a burgundy cable-knit sweater as the one most likely to hit on her. Would have to be him, he appeared to be the only man with any life moving through him from among the three or so other unattached men in here who seemed zombied out at tables barely illuminated by candles so small they weren’t even threatening to the plastic red carnations sprouting from shot glasses.
She was at the back of the bar now, her hand finally on that near-extinct specimen, a pay phone. She dialed her sister’s number hoping for Tish’s husband, prepared to hang up the phone should Nan answer again. Then there it was, Tish’s voice in prerecorded form saying, “This is the day the Lord hath made, I rejoice, am so glad that you called.” Neena swayed from the sound of her sister’s voice melting in her ear. Imagined Tish with a rounded stomach, Tish with her God-loving disposition, her sunny compliance to whatever the rules were, her petite cuteness that never garnered the type of attention from men that Neena’s appearance had. Tish pregnant. Thought back to when Tish had told her. It was in the fall, Neena remembered, because Tish was rushing off to a Halloween party sponsored by her sorority for children living in a homeless shelter. Only nice costumes, Tish had stressed. Fairy godmothers and angels and puppy-dog type costumes. “They’ve seen enough monsters in their young lives,” Tish had said, and then started to cry. Tish was always easy to cry. So unlike Neena who rarely did. Neena didn’t leave a message. She called information to try to extract her sister’s address, had tried also before she boarded the bus in Chicago. Got the same response now, a private listing. She waited for an operator to try to convince the live voice that since she knew the phone number, she should be privy to the address. To no avail.
She swallowed the desperation trying to edge up her throat as she walked to the bar and took a seat. Counted to ten. By the time she got to nine there he was talking in her ear, the man in the burgundy cable-knit sweater. “Hey lady,” he said. She exhaled softly, wishing for a mint against the roof of her mouth to overpower the smell in here of bad whiskey and overwrought cologne. “My name is Ramsey,” he continued, “and I don’t mean to intrude if you just want to sit here and be with yourself, but I just gotta say that you are the finest thing that’s walked through that door in all the years I been coming in here, and I been coming in here a lotta, lotta years. What’s your name, doll face?”
She angled slightly the swiveling bar stool so she could see him. He had a dark mouth, and a neatly trimmed mustache, a broad nose and chin, wide shoulders. A wedding band, of course. He leaned in closer and she could see the blazing white shirt collar atop his sweater. The collar line was pressed and clean and she hoped the shirt had been laundered at the cleaners and not at the hands of some hardworking wife doing double time. When her mother had had an ongoing relationship with the married man Wendell, Neena had been hyper for it to end. Though Neena had always been able to reconcile her own time with a married man.
“Doll Face,” she said then to his shirt collar.
“Excuse me?”
“You said, ‘What’s your name, Doll Face,’ and I’m telling you my name. It’s Doll Face.” She focused on his mouth, the way it took its time pulling back to a full-throttle grin. He had long, straight teeth, too white to be his own.
“Oh, you a kidder, huh,” he said on a laugh. “Well, I like to play.”
“No, no. For real,” she said. “That’s really my name. My last name is Face. My daddy named me Doll. I have a sister named Sweet and one named Baby and my brother’s name is Bold.”
His lower lip folded and unfolded itself several times as if that’s where his brain was, as if his lip was charged with determining whether or not she was just messing with him. His lip deciding to go with it, she could tell, as his tongue quickly wiped away the residue of thought and he was smiling again. “What you drinking tonight, Doll Face? Whatever your pleasure, I’m here to make it happen.”
“I’ll just have ginger ale.”
“That’s all, nothing stronger?” he asked, disappointment hanging on the end of the question as he made hand motions to the stick figure tending the bar. “You don’t drink?”
“I do.” She played with her fingers. “I’m just going through a thing right about now and I need to feel what I’m feeling.”
“Might help a pretty lady to tell a stranger all about it? Care to join me at my table?”
He extended his hand and she looked at him under-eyed, feigning shyness.
“I swear I don’t bite,” he said and she hesitated and counted three beats in her head and then allowed him to help her down from the bar stool. She followed him to a table in the back of the room. Red miniature lights framed a heart-shaped wreath on the wall behind his head and made it look as if he had donkey ears. Wondered then if that was a sign that he was a jackass. She suppressed the sudden need to laugh at the thought as she unbuttoned her coat and slid her arms out, unzipped the ankle boots, and lifted her feet back so they could dry. She could feel him staring at her, trying to get her to look at his eyes. She refused. Folded her hands on the table instead and furled and unfurled her fingers. He grabbed her pinky finger and squeezed it and she looked at his wedding band, a thick solid gold; her eyes then traced the hair on his hand to his watch, a black-face Movado.
“You from ’round here?” he asked.
She shook her head, no. “Georgia,” she said.
“Oooh, a southern girl, they grow them pretty down there. I been there plenty of times. Atlanta. The Big Peach. Had me some hot times in hotlanta.”
She looked up beyond his head to the wall and those red lights again shaped like donkey ears that fit his head so exactly. Even when he turned to acknowledge the bartender as he set their drinks down, the lights seemed to turn with him. She tried to think of the sound a donkey made, a hee-haw sound. That was a mistake because everything he said now resembled that sound. Now she was going to laugh. She bit her lip. Felt so mean to sit up here and laugh at the man. He was raising his glass in a toast. “Here’s to Georgia,” he said, though she heard hee-haw and she couldn’t hold it in. She covered her face with her hands and the laugh caught in her throat and came out like sobs. He squeezed in the chair next to hers. His arm wrapping all around her shoulder telling her to let it out, might help to tell ole Ramsey all about it, if he was anything, he was a good listener.
She manufactured tears, then let them slide melodramatically down her face. Sipped her ginger ale and put a tremble to her faux southern accent as she told him that she was sad and lonely. Her husband had just left her for her best friend and she felt incapable of trusting another human being ever.
“You can trust me. Baby, I’m for real,” he said. As if on cue the Dells crooned from the juke box, “Stay in My Corner,” the longest slow-drag song on the planet if you were caught dancing with the wrong person. “Come on, doll face, I think they’re playing our song,” he said as Neena sniffed hard and yielded to his pull on her elbow. He sang in her ear as they danced just a foot away from the table. She closed her eyes as he held her tightly and gently at the same time. She felt nothing.
Ramsey whispered to her in that man-about-to-burst-begging voice that they needed a more private corner for her to stay in. Asked her then if she would like to go for a ride over the Ben Franklin Bridge? He’d just gotten an E-ZPass and had nowhere he needed to be for the rest of the night. Didn’t have the confines of a day job either because he’d gotten a generous early-out deal when the naval shipyard closed down in the nineties.
Neena interrupted him to ask about the wedding band.
“Oh that,” he said, “means nothing,” going on to explain that he was in the midst of separating from his wife.
She assumed that he was lying though she couldn’t tell for sure because she never looked in his eyes. Didn’t look in his eyes now as they sat again at the table and he talked about his two grown daughters. His voice went soft and innocent when he told her how much his daughters looked like his mother. She figured he wouldn’t be rough or violent as he asked again if she’d like to help him christen his E-ZPass.
She kept her eyes on the table, rubbed her finger around his wedding band. “On one condition,” she said.
“Name it,” he said, and she heard the excitement in his voice shaping his words so that they sounded like gunshots.
“I have a weak stomach in a car,” she said. “And those God-awful stick shifts are the worse. I do declare you’ll be stopping every other block for me to lean out the car if you drive a stick shift. So if you don’t drive a stick, I do believe I’m inclined to go for a little ride.”
He laughed with an open mouth as he frantically dug his hands in his pocket and pulled up a slim wad of cash and pushed two fives down on the table. “I drives a Ford Tempo, baby. And my ride is as smooth or as hard as you want it to be.” He helped her with her coat, then ran his fingers through her hair all the way to her scalp and said that he loved her hair, he hadn’t seen hair like that since he’d marched with Angela Davis in Montgomery.
“Huh?” Neena asked, turning to face him. She knew that Angela Davis was too young for Montgomery; she assumed he was joking.
“Angela Davis,” he said. “You know who she is, don’t you? She was a fine something back in the day with her militant self. Yeah, that Angela Davis had a head of hair, hair didn’t even budge when they turned those fire hoses on us.”
She looked down again, at the worn vinyl flooring, and said Jesus to herself. Then suggested that they stop at one of the thousands of liquor stores on Baird Boulevard so that he could get what he liked to drink, thinking the quicker for him to pass out with. He told her, no need, he carried his pleasures with him at all times, right in his car trunk. She was relieved that at least he didn’t say in his pants.
He turned into the parking lot of a roadside motel that boasted twenty-four-hour cable. “Lovely rooms at this place,” he whispered in her ear as he checked in with a debit card, then once inside the room that smelled of Lysol and bug spray he tossed his coat on the bed, barely giving Neena a chance to hang hers in the closet before he was grabbing at her, pushing his fingers through her hair again, telling her how much he loved her hair. She held him tightly and sniffled and when he pulled himself back to look at her, to ask her what was wrong, was she thinking about that two-timing husband of hers, she looked down at the wheat-colored carpet and mumbled out that she had just had a female procedure done the day before and she was limited in her womanly abilities, forcing the tears again, “but oh, my, my, my, we can improvise,” she said, as she pulled him in a slow drag and used her knee the quicker to bring his essence down, which badly spotted her skirt, thank goodness it was black, wool.
She went into the bathroom and wiped the skirt and while she was at it washed her stockings with a thimble-sized bottle of shampoo. She tried to focus on everything outside of herself: the emerald green of the shampoo seeping into the nylon, the sweet minty smell; anything so that her interior would remain integrated, so that she wouldn’t separate from herself and start floating around in this bathroom and see herself with an objective detachment, that she’d just gone into a ghetto bar and allowed herself to be picked up and brought to some roadside dive. She hung the skirt and stockings from the showerhead even noticing the graceful way the neck to the showerhead curved, like a swan’s, she thought, as she went back into the bedroom and sat in her turtleneck and panties next to Ramsey while he ha ha-ed at the television. “A Green Acres marathon on tonight. I swear this is some funny shit,” he said. He seemed so wide awake, so sober, she wondered if it was just water in that bottle, not vodka.
She sat there for a full two hours watching the unintelligible banter, trying not to think about her mother; when her mother was buoyant she would sometimes talk in an accent like that, calling Neena and Tish darling the way Zsa Zsa was saying it now; whatever else she was saying had Ramsey shaking the bed, he was laughing so hard. She rolled her eyes up into her head, thinking he was intentionally trying to spite her by not finally passing out.
She got up to go to the bathroom. She locked the bathroom door and sat on the side of the tub and asked herself what was she even doing here. She’d not done anything this low-budget ever. She tried to convince herself that she’d only gone into that little neighborhood bar in West Philly because of the lit apostrophe, because she felt that’s what her life had come down to as well, the nomenclature blacked out, the apostrophe still glowing orange-red though. Told herself that she’d only left with Ramsey because he had wide shoulders and she thought that he’d be content to let her lay her head close to his heart for a while. She told herself she’d just wanted to fall asleep counting heartbeats. Wondered if that was even possible anymore, did such softness even exist.
The stockings were swinging as they hung from the showerhead. She felt them. They were damp, but dry enough, she thought, deciding she’d tell him she was ready to go. Go where? Where? Nan’s!? She felt a scream edging up her throat. She certainly couldn’t go to Nan’s in the middle of the night like this. Couldn’t go there period now that she’d acted like a common street whore. Nan would smell her wrongdoing the way she always had. She jammed a fist into her mouth so she wouldn’t scream. Sat down on the side of the tub to try to focus on her breathing. The stockings swaying from the showerhead made shadows on the wall and she was getting the picture of a fresh-killed piglet swinging over the sawdust-covered floor of a Ninth Street butcher shop. The image making her think of her mother, the way her mother would sometimes stop at the butcher shop window and stare in at the piglets swaying and twirling, blood dripping from their mouths frozen in midair. Freeda would point to the mouths. “It’s so sad,” she’d say. “They’re smiling; probably thought they were headed for a romp in the mud.”
Neena tried to shake the image. Did now what she’d always done when she needed to distract herself from thinking about her mother. Blamed Nan. Nan with her tightly curled hair, her oversized patent leather purse swinging from her arm, her look of bewildered sadness during Neena’s growing-up years when Freeda was hours overdue for retrieving Neena and Tish and Nan would slant her chin toward the traverse rod as she closed the gold-brocaded drapes for the night at her living room window. “Looks like your mother won’t be right back after all,” she’d whisper. “Look like y’all here with me for a spell.” So many times Neena had felt a brick drop inside as she heard those words, and she’d fault Nan for her mother’s failure to return. Faulted Nan right now for her circumstance of sitting on the side of this tub. Had Nan just given her Tish’s whereabouts, she could be with her sister right now. What she wouldn’t give to hear Tish’s voice in the real. To be so close, too close, and unable to feel Tish grab her with such a ferocity. My sister, Tish would say, and then pull Neena in a tight hug. And Neena would pretend that she was above such sentimental gushing, even as she’d yield herself so completely to the closeness. If not for Nan withholding Tish, Neena could right now be rubbing her hand over Tish’s stomach, encouraging the baby forming there to keep up the fight. The baby would sense her goodness, her worth. The baby would know that Neena didn’t have the devil in her like Nan always said. Tish knew it too. Nan was really the one with the devil in her. If not for Nan she could right now be turning down the covers in her sister’s guest room. Imagined a leather pull-out sofa, satin-trimmed blanket, flannel sheets with pink pansies.
Damn you, Nan, she said out loud even as she heard Ramsey on the other side of the door gawking at Green Acres. Damn you, she said again, feeling that boulder come up in her chest that often surfaced as a result of Nan, separating her from Nan.
She’d first felt that separation when she was only seven, Tish not quite four, 1978 and Freeda had been gone for about a year. Nan called Neena and Tish in that urgent voice, interrupting their game of jump rope in their cutoff jeans and fraying canvas sneakers. She had a hot bath waiting for them and she scrubbed them down herself with Ivory Soap as if she didn’t trust them to get themselves clean enough. She slathered their elbows and knees with petroleum jelly. She hard-pressed their hair with VO5 that added a sweetness to the acrid scent of burning hair. She clothed them in white cotton blouses that had been freshly line-dried, starched, and ironed, and newly made pink and white gingham skirts with kick-out pleats. It felt like Easter to Neena because she was wearing a nylon slip and her barely walked-in patent leather shoes.
She and Tish looked like Kewpie dolls as Nan paraded them out for a nice long ride on the D bus to Wanamaker’s department store in town. “These here are my grand,” she beamed in response to the multitude of comments from strangers on the bus of how cute the little girls were, how well-groomed. Repeating it over again as they walked along Chestnut Street, and even as they spread out at the counter in Wanamaker’s basement and Neena and Tish laughed as they swiveled on the red leather padded counter stools and Nan ordered them each a vanilla shake and a foot-long hotdog on a hoagie roll. Afterward Nan said they would walk some to help digest the meal. They walked for what seemed like miles south on Broad Street, walked so long that Neena’s church shoes were beginning to rub against the backs of her feet and she could feel holes forming in the heels of her lacey anklet socks. “Where we going, Nan?” she asked. “My shoes hurt. Will we be there soon?”
“We’re going where we’re going and we’ll be there when we get there,” Nan said and Neena clamped her lips together then because she knew when Nan talked like that it could mean a back hand against her mouth if she kept pressing Nan. She tried to ignore the feel of imitation patent leather against her heels even as she wanted to remind Nan that she herself had said the shoes were just for church, that they were cheap shoes with a plastic lining and would mess up their feet if they kept them on for too long. She wanted to ask Tish if her feet hurt too but Tish was on the other side of Nan swinging her arm happily as she walked, and anyhow Neena was now distracted from the feel of the tender skin being rubbed away from her heels because now they turned one corner after another and the streets got smaller and smaller until they were like alleyways that could hardly contain the oversized cats that kept jumping from the steel trash cans, and even turning the cans over so that Neena and Tish and Nan had to step out into the street to avoid the strewn contents that smelled mostly of fish.
Nan stopped finally as they walked through the tiniest alley of a block. She stood in front of a narrow house that looked to Neena as if it wanted to collapse, probably would have fallen long ago, Neena thought, if it wasn’t connected to the houses on either side that appeared to be holding that one up, the front door a marred board of splintered wood, a hole where the knob should be.
“Come on,” Nan said as she pulled both of them by their hands; her voice sounded so cloudy as if she needed to clear her throat. They walked up the three short steps, the steps smooth and depressed in the middle. Nan knocked hard on the door with the foot of her balled hand and then looked at her hand and then looked around as if trying to find something to wipe her hands on. Neena noticed all of a sudden then that the orange-red-tinged air was being overtaken by the night, either that or this tight alleyway of a street was just darker than the rest of the world and her stomach started turning in on itself and she was about to risk a backhand to her mouth and ask Nan where had she brought them. Plus Neena was worried about Tish; Tish was starting to hum the Winnie the Pooh song and Neena knew that Tish only hummed like that when she was afraid. But before Neena could say anything the door crunched open and a man stood in the doorway looking at them, and then looking away and then saying, damn, dragging the word out. A thick gold cross swung from around his neck and kept hitting against a splatter of a grease stain on his pale blue tie, his suit also pale blue, a white handkerchief bunched into his lapel pocket that he pulled out now and rubbed across his brow, his brow dripping with sweat and no doubt, Neena thought, the thick pomade that sat on the top of his badly processed hair. Neena noticed then that his pants zipper was undone, and she guessed that he became aware of it in the same instant because suddenly a briefcase appeared right there, obstructing Neena’s view into his nasty manhood.
“I’m looking for Freeda, I’m her mother, a lady from my church said she heard that Freeda was spotted living over this way,” Nan said and Neena’s heart stopped beating right then because Neena had not seen her mother in over a year. Neena had wished for her mother’s appearance whenever there was a chance a wish might come true, like right before she blew out the candles on her last birthday cake, or when a star seemed to shoot across the sky, or she caught a whiskered dandelion, even before she fell asleep on Christmas Eve. Please let my mother be standing here when I open my eyes, she’d wish. And now here was Nan calling her mother’s name as if her mother might be as close as the other side of this greasy-headed man slopping his false teeth around in his mouth. Neena pushed past him. “Mommy, mommy,” she cried as she ran into the house. “Mommy, it’s me, it’s Neena.”
A short hallway ended on a wide open room that smelled of turnips and whiskey. A rotating fan chopped at the air in the corner and Neena’s eye followed the sound to the other side of the room beyond a mountain of rumpled bedclothes. Then she saw the mattress, the slight woman on the mattress breathing to the beat of the fan; her lacey full slip was rolled all the way up to her waist. Her nakedness glistened and made a screeching sound in Neena’s head like a fork hard-scraping a plate. Neena rushed to cover her with one of the crumpled sheets. She smoothed the sheet over her just as Nan and Tish ran in. Nan calling frantically for Neena, Tish holding tightly to Nan’s hand while her other hand covered her eyes, saying that she was afraid in here. “Let’s go, Nan. I’m scared, I’m scared,” Tish pleaded.
Nan and Neena just stood there looking at each other, the woman snoring on the floor between them. Nan was breathing hard and choking back sobs. “I wanted her to see you and your sister,” she said. “I wanted her to see what she was losing if she didn’t turn her life around. But she’s of the condition to see nothing right about now, already lost you and your sister far as I’m concerned. Come on, Neena.” Nan reached out her hand. “She’s dead to us, let’s go, let’s go.”
“She’s not dead,” Neena said. “She’s breathing, Nan, don’t you hear her, she’s not dead, she’s only asleep.”
“She’s drunk—”
“She’s not drunk either. She’s only sleeping and I’m staying here ’til she wakes up.” Neena kneeled on the mattress and shook her mother.
“Neena, get up from there, you don’t know what kind of germs living in that mattress,” Nan said, tugging with one hand the tail of the starched white blouse that Neena wore, holding fast to Tish with her other hand. Tish with her eyes still closed, whimpering, working herself up to a cry.
Neena pulled herself from her grandmother’s grasp. “Come on, wake up, Mommy, it’s me, Neena, your little girl. Wake up and see how cute I look with my hair pressed out. It’s me, Mommy. It’s Neena, your little doll baby.” She pushed at Freeda to make her turn around, then leaned in so she could kiss her mouth the way she’d always kissed her mother’s mouth. Except that now the face was in full view and Neena could see that this was not her mother’s face, the mouth curving back into a smile certainly not Freeda’s gushy smile, the arms reaching for Neena, pulling her all the way onto the mattress not Freeda’s arms. The arms held her so tightly she could barely breathe. The voice in her ear saying, My baby, my little girl, you came back to me.
“Lord, Jesus,” Nan said on an extended whisper, “you not Freeda,” yelling then for the woman to turn her grandbaby loose, turn her loose right now.
Neena struggled against the woman and the woman held her harder still. She called Neena baby and sweetie and honey and Neena listened for a real name, thinking that if she came across a little girl with that name she could ask her where her mother was and if the girl didn’t know then Neena could tell her. Maybe too that little girl might know where Freeda was; perhaps she’d also been taken to the wrong house by her grandmother just like Neena. Now Neena gave in to the woman’s arms. If Freeda mistook another little girl for Neena, Neena would want that little girl to hug Freeda as well. Now the woman cried, and Neena said, “Don’t cry, Mommy, it’s okay,” even as Nan pulled and yanked and tried to peel the woman’s arms snaked around Neena’s back.
“Neena, you lost your mind, that’s not your mother. Get up from there,” Nan screamed, and Neena wished that there was some way that she could give Nan a signal to let her know that of course that wasn’t Freeda; she was only trying to make the woman feel not so sad. She kissed the woman’s chin and then Nan landed her open hand against the side of Neena’s face. Neena didn’t feel the sting of the slap, felt instead the woman’s arms loosening from around her.
Now Tish let out an extended shriek at the sound of the slap. Tish with her eyes still pressed shut crying, “What’s happening? Let’s go, please let’s go.”
“Who’s hitting her, why are you hitting her?” the woman asked, pointing her finger in the wrong direction toward the wall, her eyes open but unfocused. “Hit her again and I’ll make you pay,” she said.
“You need to pray to be delivered from this hell,” Nan said as she snatched Neena up from the mattress. “And you need to know if you lay down with pigs you wake up smelling like shit,” she said to Neena as she shook her by the arm. “How dare you kiss such vermin.”
Neena glanced down at the mattress to see if Nan’s words had made the woman cry harder. The woman, though, was already snoring again; Neena already missing the tight thinness of the woman’s arms. Tish screamed inconsolably for them to leave, please could they leave.
They stumbled back toward the front door, Nan shepherding them out of the house onto the narrow alleyway of a street where night was starting to fall; the night somewhat kind at that moment the way the blue-gray air blurred the harshness of that block so that even the cats looked as if they could have been cuddly pets. Nan pulled Neena and Tish close under her arms as they walked, consoling them, and herself, with It’s all right, thank God that wasn’t your mother, it’s all gonna be all right. “Neena, your mouth okay? I didn’t mean to have to hit you like that but that was urgent. Lord Jesus, Neena. You too young to even understand.”
Neena started with the questions. “Who was the lady, Nan? Where do you think her little girl is at? Who do you think her little girl is? What was wrong with the lady? Where do you think Mommy’s at now, Nan? What do you think she’s doing? Who do you think she’s with? You think she’s safe? Is she all right? Huh, Nan, do you think my mother’s all right?”
Nan tried to explain the woman’s condition by saying that she’d fallen into a badness of mind. That her mind made her do things that weren’t the right things to do. Extended that explanation to Freeda, why they hadn’t heard from Freeda, Freeda was suffering from a badness of mind. Tish cried then that she was afraid of Freeda, please save her from catching her mother’s badness.
Then Nan repeated what she’d said back in that room that smelled of turnips and whiskey. Told them that the only way they were going to have peace about their mother was just to accept her as dead.
“But what about when she comes back?” Neena asked.
“Well, then, we can be happy that she’s resurrected. But for now, she’s dead, Neena, like that woman back there is dead. Let your mother be dead and ask the Good Lord to heal your broken heart.”
Neena wanted to ask Nan if they could turn around and go back for the woman and help her off the mattress and take her home with them and give her a bath and feed her chicken and dumplings and resurrect her. They could help the woman find her own little girl and that child could feel the sun come up in her chest the way Neena felt whenever Freeda returned. Neena didn’t ask though. She listened to Nan talk about the power of prayer. She retreated inside of herself and stopped with the questions. She put on her nice-girl face and nestled deeper under her grandmother’s arm as they turned back onto Broad Street. She started to disbelieve her grandmother then. By then Neena was too familiar with the minty smell of her mother’s sighs. Had too often felt her mother’s backhand gently against her forehead checking for a fever, or Freeda’s fingers aimlessly pulling at her hair when she laid her head in her mother’s lap. By then she had curtsied for her mother too many Easters after practicing the recitation she’d say at the children’s service at church. Had too many bubble baths drawn by her mother, had her knees and elbows scrubbed too much, her eyelids kissed, her bangs curled under into perfectly shaped barrels. Had shaken her mother far too many times to bring her attention back when that hollowed-out stare overtook her eyes. Had crossed too many big streets alone to find a store that sold Argo starch when Freeda was running low. She’d cried too hard each time Freeda went away, the-inside-of-the-skull crying that caused her head to pound for hours after. She’d jumped like the cow over the moon elated at Freeda’s inevitable return. Because Freeda always returned. She’d return happy and able. Neena reminded herself of that as they walked. Too young to be aware that she was beginning the process of rejecting a lot of Nan’s teachings: that good is always rewarded in the end; that you reap what you sow; that joy cometh in the morning; that hard honest work is the antidote for depression; that Jesus Christ is Lord. Neena was even beginning to disbelieve that. A little at a time as if all the imprinting of all the things she knew to be true were being slowly lifted from the grooves, the grooves filling in with sand. Felt like a silver pinball in the game machine at Mr. Cook’s Hoagie and Variety Store when the lever misfires and doesn’t send the ball up the column into the game so the ball slides backward until it finally drops with a clang into the pocket separated from the balls still in play. Even as Nan pulled her closer under her arm, Neena felt farther and farther away.
Ramsey had finally stopped with the hee-haw laughter as Neena stood from her seat on the side of the tub and hung her things on the back of the bathroom door. She ran the shower then and got in and washed up. Scrubbed herself as much as the minuscule bar of soap would allow. She finger-parted her hair and plaited it in two uneven cornrows. She dressed and swallowed three glasses of spigot water. She felt as if she might vomit when she opened the bathroom door and stepped back into the room. Though music greeted her when she did. Sweet music. The sounds of Ramsey’s snores.
His keys were on the nightstand next to his watch. She snatched up both in one quick move, then retrieved her purse from the dresser, stepped into her boots, and grabbed her coat from the closet. She dropped the keys and watch in the coat pocket and headed for the door thinking she’d let him keep his wedding band. Stopped then and listened for the breaks between his snores as she tiptoed to the side of the bed and stood over him. She lifted his hand and brought it to her lips and kissed it, she tugged at his ring as she did. Not as if he was trying to honor what the ring represented. The ring was stubborn and she knew that she should just let it be. She’d lost a good ring once; her finger had throbbed for a week after missing that ring. His finger should throb too, she thought, as she looked at the bottle of Gordon’s to measure how much he’d drank. Told herself this was indeed a drunken stupor as she tugged and twisted the ring and thought about rubbing the finger down with shampoo, remembering then she’d used it to clean his essence from the skirt. Angry now at herself for even being here like she was some common whore. She wasn’t, she told herself, as she felt the ring loosen and gave it one more pull and it slid off into her palm. His hand, though, suddenly stiff and she blinked and then was looking into his wide open eyes. They were green eyes and that surprised her because he was a blackened complexion. Wondered if he was kin to the devil with eyes so light. The thought giving quickness to her movements as she backed up, said she was ready to go, was he ready to take her, wasn’t that Green Acres hilarious. Talking nonsense now as she reached behind her to open the door, watched him shake his head back and forth trying to shake his consciousness into full existence. She was out of the room now, running along the stained orange carpet in the hallway, down the first flight of stairs, hoping these were the ones that led to the car, a burgundy Ford Tempo. Shit, they were all white from the snow. She barely remembered the car’s shape. She heard him above her, on the balcony, really just a ledge outside of the room. She didn’t look up as he yelled for her to stop, called her a lowlife thieving bitch. “You touch my car and I’mma kill you,” he said. She slipped on the snow-slicked asphalt as she ran, recovered herself and hit the remote on the key chain, and ran to the car that flashed its headlights, saying Thank you, Jesus, the irony of calling on Jesus in this situation banding around her chest and she could barely breathe as she jumped into the car and blasted the ignition, jerking the car into reverse just in time to see him run from the stairwell. She took her time so that the car wouldn’t go into a skid as she slid the transmission into drive, turning out of the parking lot onto the highway, coasting until it was time for her to get into the E-ZPass lane.
She parked the car in downtown Philly in a tow-away zone. Daylight was making pink and yellow noises overhead as she pushed through the lower-budget shopping district lined with dollar stores and wig stores; jewelry we-buy-gold-and-silver type stores; multipurpose stores that sold fake Versace jeans, and the latest underground rap CDs. The bus station too was in this part of town with its trundling lines: the too-broke or too-prudent to take Amtrak, the too-motion-sensitive to fly, departing; the view of their backs quickly interrupted by faces of the newly arrived. That was her plan right now. Claim a hard seat at the bus station until the pawnshops were open and ready to deal. Get what she could for the watch and ring and hope for enough to buy a hotel room for the night.
Now she realized she had passed the street where she should have turned off. Now she was on Race Street in Chinatown. The whoosh of traffic on Vine Street moved from intermittent to continuously flowing. The lights from the Ben Franklin Bridge poked into the sky, the sky loosening itself up and shaking out widening bands of pink and yellow. It was a spectacular sight and she got chills as she stood there watching the interplay of the bridge lights, the light pouring from the sky. She was often hyperperceptive in the dawn hour. Affected by sensory detail that would have ordinarily escaped her. Like now as she heard a sound that almost did make her cry. The flute. She couldn’t believe this was the same musician from earlier, that he was playing “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” Thought at first she was imagining the sound, imagining him, but there he was sitting on the steps of the Hong Kong Restaurant.
She watched him as he played, glad that his feet were fully covered this time in barely worn Timberlands. Same long green coat he’d had on earlier; a quality, plaid muffler draped over his shoulders. He had a mild-looking face, long, like his nose and neck were long, long line of a mouth she could see even with his lips pursed. His shoulder-length locks were pulled back in a ponytail, his face shiny as if slathered recently with Vaseline. He eased the mouthpiece from his lips and his last note held there shimmering in the air between them. Now his voice took up the space. “You got anybody laying down for you, baby?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“A bridge? You got a living bridge?”
“I have—a—yeah, I have a sister,” she said emphatically, then wondered who she was trying to convince.
“Yeah? Where is she?”
“Uh, here, you know, in Philly, I’m on my way to get to her, she might be having a miscarriage—” She stopped herself. She felt challenged, felt silly.
“Sounds like she’s in no better shape than you.”
“I mean, well, I have a grandmother here too, you know, it’s just—”
He raised his finger. “It’s cool,” he said. “I only asked ’cause it’s important for a person to know where their bridge is. If it’s your grandmother, you know, cool, so you go to your grandmother.”
She nodded. She didn’t know what else to say. And anyhow he put his breath back to his flute and resumed the song. The sound was like crystal curving through the air and Neena stood and listened until the end of the song. Then she rifled through her purse heavy with Ramsey’s watch and ring to pull up her last five-dollar bill. He held his hand up then to stop her. “Let’s keep it pure, baby,” he said as he put his mouthpiece back to his lips and started to blow some more.
She sat next to him on the steps. The concrete was hard and cold against her. She had been asked many things of a man in the predawn hour. Never purity. She could feel the widening bands of daylight moving through the air. Now he played “I’ll Be There.” The music’s largeness sucked the chill from the air. It was warm—the music, the air—as it seeped through her pores. She breathed deeply and took in the scent of car fumes mixed with dumplings frying. The music was inside her now, in her chest keeping time with her breathing. She didn’t even realize that he’d stopped playing until she felt his arm around her shoulder, his fingers falling against her forearm in ripples. So soothing his fingers were. His hand squeezing her shoulder now the way a brother would, drawing her in until her head took up the space around his long neck and she was doing what she hadn’t done since she was a teen. She cried. Big heaving cries that felt like drumrolls pulsing out of her as Bow Peep said, Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even that was to the beat.