Kitt creamed her fingers for the new back she was about to do. A licensed pratical nurse by training, she’d scaled down to part-time years ago so that she could be there when Sage got home from school. Replaced the lost income by doling out massages from the mauve-colored room off of her kitchen. Business was good though, thanks to her regular clients, mostly cops from the eighteenth district, and she really only held on to her LPN job at the Care Pavilion Nursing Home for the health insurance and retirement benefits.
This was her last back for the day and she thought that when she was finished she would call Verdi and see how she’d made out getting home so late last night. Kitt was maternal toward Verdi, even though they were both the same age, forty; both only children born to fraternal-twin sisters, Posie and Hortense, who, fortunate for the cousins, had passed down their good looks: their unstoppable cheekbones and fleshy ear-to-ear grins, brown-over-gold complexions, downwardly slanted eyes. Fortunate too that the cousins didn’t inherit their mothers’ relationship that had gone to tin years ago when they parted ways over a man, when Hortense ran away to Atlanta with the smart, upwardly mobile young divinity student that Posie said had first had eyes for her. Posie stayed in Philadelphia and married down, often, each husband filled with more promise and less resources than the one before, and even though Posie’s men made up for in passion and excitement what they lacked in bank balances, she blamed Hortense each time one of her men went bad, said it was Hortense’s conniving ways that had snagged the one who would have been a keeper in her life. But Verdi and Kitt filled in the canyon of sisterly affection their mothers left and managed to spend summers and extended holidays together through all of their growing-up years thanks to the Greyhound bus. And Kitt fussed over Verdi, instructing her as if Verdi’s moneyed upbringing in the cultured mannered traditions of the Georgia black middle class had detracted years from her chronological age and left her too soft around the edges to fend for herself, while Kitt believed that her own raising that happened in the financially varied neighborhood of West Philadelphia added onto her years and turned her into a wise woman even in her youth. An old soul, Kitt called herself.
Right now Kitt promised herself that she wouldn’t say anything more to Verdi about Johnson being back than she’d already said at dinner last night. She’d decided to just go ahead and set up a meeting between them and not even say anything beforehand, decided to use Sage’s birthday party as the venue. That’s the other reason she needed to call Verdi, to tell her about Sage’s party, if she could ever get to the phone, since she was starting much later than she’d planned on this new back.
Usually when she came into the massage room on the other side of her kitchen, they were already facedown in the chair or on the table, depending on whether they were getting a neck-and-back or a full-body, but usually they were her regulars, this one had been referred by one of her regular cops from Pine Street. He wasn’t a cop, an accountant, or middle-management something at the university. Had tried to stand there and take off his blue-and-white-striped heavily starched shirt right in front of her. She never watched them take off their shirts, too personal a thing to do. But when she started to turn around and leave the room, he’d called her name, said, “Miss Kitt, where did you say I should hang my shirt?”
She came all the way into the room and closed the door and showed him the hanger and hook on the back of the door. He was doused in some unisex cologne that smelled sweet and musky and she reached into the deep pockets of her soft pink jacket for her cigarette lighter and set it on the table next to her vanilla-scented candle.
He was out of his shirt now, his undershirt too, and hung both on the hook without using the hanger and she was left staring at his buckskin-colored-shade-of-brown chest. She looked down, focused on his shoes, nice leather oxfords with a hand-stitched look to them.
She looked quickly past his chest to get to his face, saw how big his pupils were, like silver dollars just dipped in pitch tar as he stood there waiting for her directions. She dismissed the eyes, didn’t want to acknowledge that he was affected by her, that could really skew a session. She cleared her throat, said, “I’ll help you into the chair since this is your first time; next time, if there is a next time, when I come in here, this is how I’d like to find you.”
“Whatever you say, Miss Kitt.” He half laughed as he unconsciously (seemingly) stroked the hairs on his chest. “I mean, you come so highly recommended, I’ve been told that your massages put a man in the mood for some nighttime frivolity.”
She took a deep breath, then let the room go completely still. She pointed to the certificate hanging over the specially designed massaging chair made for kneeling onto with a foam-backed face rest at the top of the chair. In a low, even tone she said, “Sir, I’m not at all concerned with what you or anybody else does before or after you take up time and space in my room. My massages are the result of an associate’s degree worth of training and are completely by the book. I hope we understand each other.”
His face got all sheepish then and he apologized, said he’d meant no disrespect. She softened; he looked so drawn around the mouth, tired.
She pointed to the knee rests and guided him by the elbow to help him get into position in the chair. Comfortable?” she asked after she manipulated the foam inside of the face rest so that it wasn’t pressing too tightly against his skin. She leaned down to say it in his ear. “Because this face rest adjusts if you’re not.”
He shook his head, yes.
She mashed a button on the boom box resting on a shelf above her head. “I’m just turning on a little jazz on RTI. If that doesn’t suit you, I can pop in a tape, or if you’d rather no music, that’s fine too. Just let me know.”
The back of his head nodded in agreement.
“I don’t usually talk during the session, most just like to go with the music and what I’m doing to the muscles in their back. But if you got something on your mind, I can listen.” She turned the dimmer switch down and the mauve-colored walls in this room took on a muted brownish tone. She lit the vanilla-scented candle and waved at the flame to get the scent moving through the room. She flexed her fingers one more time, squirted cream in dime-sized puddles at various points from his shoulders to his waist. She leaned then with her whole body into this wide, thick back.
He released a whispered ooh as she started at his neck. She mashed with her whole weight into her thumbs and dragged them down the length of his frame on either side of his spine. His oohs got louder the harder she pressed and she could feel the muscles in his back expanding, stretching out in response to her fingers. She needed that. Needed to know that what she was doing felt good. She’d always thought backs rendered more grief than any other body part. If you had time to dwell on someone’s back, she reasoned, they were in the process of walking away from you, leaving. Hadn’t she seen her mother cry over the sight of countless backs, shirted, bare, broad, humped, wide, with varying degrees of spine? Hadn’t she cried over one? So what she did with the backs seemingly to generate income, she also did to mitigate her rage at the sight of them. She could either rub them down, or hack them with a carver. On this she was definite, there was no middle ground.
She breathed in deeply through her nose. The vanilla radiating from the candle swam to her head and she felt a giddiness descend as Sarah Vaughan blared “Misty” through the radio. This one’s oohs had graduated to oh Gods and she added her other fingers to her thumbs, and at certain points mashed with the heel of her palm. She closed her eyes so that she could really palpate this back and even absorb its electrical charge. Some backs were like that; they just opened for her at every possible hairline crevice, allowing her to send her touch to radiate even beyond the bones, and in gratitude the muscles offered up their own impulses that entered through her fingertips and rushed to her brain and affected her like endorphins flying around in a runner’s head. She was buzzing now as she squeezed and pressed and kneaded and hacked and went deeper and deeper and now she couldn’t even tell where her fingers ended and this back began, so fused were the two. And this session was everything it should be, the way she wished they all could be. And when it got to this point, she was no longer starved and afraid at the same time for the companionship of a man, lonely; and her beautiful daughter Sage was no longer mute and could speak fluent sentences like any other seven-year-old. And his sighs of Lord, Lord, oh my Lord filled the room and even flooded out the sound of Sarah’s voice, and now she lived in a center city town house that was better even than Verdi’s house, and she’d been born to Verdi’s sagacious mother Hortense who knew how to do more for a man than keep him stirred up in her pheromonal thickness the way that her own mother Posie did all of the men she loved. Have them half-crazed over her, ready to dispense with whatever they did in their practical lives and kick her door down to get to her until she saturated them in her brand of womanhood that oozed like liquid silk. And once they’d had their fill of her, after a month, two, three, rarely more than a year, they’d disengage from her shaking their heads, asking themselves what had come over them to have them laying up so. Kitt hated that about her mother, that she always allowed them to be the ones doing the leaving. Her aunt Hortense, on the other hand, knew how to make the man do the pleasing, at least she’d done it with Verdi’s father, had him pastoring one of the poshest congregations in Georgia, and at the same time treating her as if she were a queen. Kitt always figured that if the story about Posie and Verdi’s father, Leroy, even had any truth to it, that it was better that he’d favored Hortense in the end, that Posie wouldn’t have known what to do with the likes of a Leroy anyhow.
But even that didn’t matter, her hands were so on fire as she pushed into this back, as if she’d pummeled all the way through to some other side and was up to her elbows, covered in his buckskin-colored-shade-of-brown back. But right then she felt a change in the air behind her diluting the charge this one was sending to her brain, the creak of the door opening, turned, and there Posie was.
Kitt grimaced when she looked at Posie standing there, head tilted to the side like a five-year-old, baby blue eye shadow swathed over her generous lids, frosted mocha lipstick like the kind a prom queen would have worn in 1968, hair way too long for a woman her age, hips too rounded, too pronounced, pushing from under her waist-cinching belt.
She stretched her mouth wide, told Posie to get out without allowing a sound to come from her mouth. She didn’t want to have to stop now, especially since this was his first time; she knew that once she stopped, she could never pick up and get it to be as good as it was where she’d left off. She jabbed her finger in the air, pointing beyond Posie; Posie just stood there with her head tilted, her expression midway between delight and confusion. Kitt scowled at Posie as she kept her other hand moving in wide circles against this back, and then, to her great relief she saw Sage approach the door, walking on her tippy toes, pulling her grandmother by the arm, her finger against her mouth. Gingerly pushing the door all the way closed. My God, Kitt thought, and they say Sage is the one with the limited brain, they never met Mama that’s for sure.
“Everything okay?” this one asked.
She tapped his back to let him know that it was.
“My God, you’re good,” he whispered between his moans of satisfaction. “Damn.”
She squeezed his neck in response.
“Shit, I want to marry you, and after my last wife I swore I’d never do anything as emotionally destabilizing as promising to live in relative harmony with anything that raises as much hell as a black woman.”
She slapped his back then, it was almost a playful slap and she surprised herself that she felt the need to giggle. What did he say his name was? Bruce. That was it. He looked like a Bruce in the face with his poppy eyes and bulldog nose. Cute though. She did remember that she liked the way his face rounded out when he’d fixed it to apologize. She stopped her thinking. Prided herself on the detachment she maintained with all of her clients. She could quickly kill her business if she ever let a session turn into something it wasn’t by viewing a client as anything more than a back, by allowing her thoughts about a man to ooze through her fingertips. She returned to using her thumbs. Her thumbs were toughened from years of lifting hot pans without an oven mitt.
“Married?” he asked.
She stiffened at the question. She didn’t answer though, didn’t tell him that she’d been married once to the father of her daughter but that he had a roaming eye and unfortunately the bulge in his pants tried to keep up with his eye; she just kept working the base of his neck with her thumbs.
“That’s right, you said you don’t talk, sorry.” He sighed, then added, “Damn, I’ve apologized twice in a very short time frame, anybody that makes me do that ought to at least let me take them out to dinner.”
She still didn’t answer. She’d been come onto less in the past year than she had even when she was round with Sage in her womb. She thought it had something to do with twisting her hair into locks that the unenlightened still associated with MOVE or Jamaican Rastahs. No matter, her locks certainly weeded out the bullshitting men.
His voice was muffled and low pushing through the face rest and that took some of the charge out of his words and made them easier for her to ignore. Anyhow, she had a firm do-not-date policy when it came to these backs. And now this one’s time was up. She did one more sweep of his back in wide circles. Worked the pressure points in his scalp for thirty seconds. Whispered that he could take his time putting his shirt on as she snuffed the vanilla-scented candle. She left the light on dim, then closed the door on the room off of the kitchen and went to wash her hands and come out of her jacket and give Posie hell for barging in on her like that.
Posie was squeezed up with Sage in Kitt’s newly reupholstered wing chair that sat at a slant at the living-room window. She rubbed her hand up and down Sage’s back. “Uh-oh, baby, your grandmama’s just in a little trouble.”
Kitt let go an exasperated sigh. “Mama, please, how can you be in trouble with me, I’m the daughter, you’re the mother, remember.”
“Oh, I just said that to joke with Sage, but you are upset with me. I mean, look in the mirror and see how your veins are popping.”
“You darn right I’m upset.” Kitt cut her off, snapped at the air in a hushed tone, and then quietly spit her words back at Posie. “How many times have I told you that you can’t just come and barge in here on me when I’m working. I mean it takes time to set a mood, this was his first time and I depend on repeaters, furthermore I don’t even talk, and here you come ready to start blabbering all loud about a bunch of nothing probably having to do with your latest gigolo—”
She stopped herself. If not for the hurt look coming up on Posie’s face then surely for the way Sage stared at her not even blinking.
Posie lifted one of Sage’s soft and thick wheat-colored braids, studied the braid so that she didn’t have to look at Kitt. “Mama’s sorry, darling,” she said to Sage’s hair. “I was so caught up in what I wanted to tell you, I completely forgot you were working. You know I wouldn’t hurt your livelihood for anything in the world.”
Sage reached up and put her arm around her grandmother’s neck and patted the back of her neck.
“Shit,” Kitt said under her breath. “Shit, damn, shit.” Not only did her mother make her feel as if she’d just tied her to a railroad track whenever she corrected some inappropriately immature thing she did, now her daughter was staring at her as if she’d just shot an arrow through Posie’s heart.
But right then Bruce reemerged into the living room, remnants of the vanilla scent still hanging to him, and she had to swallow what was left of her outburst, even as she watched Posie wriggling her hips and struggling to sit up on the edge of her seat, and pulling her stomach in so that her chest protruded just so.
Kitt turned her back on her mother. “I’ll look to hear from you should you like to schedule another appointment,” she said as she started leading him quickly toward the door to the enclosed porch, ignoring Posie who was clearing her throat in the most audible tones. But then she couldn’t ignore Posie when she yelled out, “Kitt, doll, aren’t you going to introduce us?” She sighed and stopped and rolled her eyes.
Bruce turned around and bowed slightly and smiled.
“Uh, Bruce, this is my mother, Posie, and my daughter, Sage,” Kitt said, trying not to let her agitation slip out in her tone.
“Police officer?” Posie asked as she stood and extended her hand.
“No, Mama. He works at the university.”
“Teach there?” Posie was all smiles, and even laughing between her words when she noticed his wedding-band finger was bare, had been bare, skin tone nice and even going up and down the entire finger.
“No, uh, I work in development; may I call you Posie?”
“Well, if you don’t I’m just going to hit you, I am.” She slapped his arm playfully. “I hope you enjoyed my daughter’s massage. She’s the best, I want you to know that.”
Kitt rolled her eyes in her head. Bad enough when she thought Posie was coming onto the man for herself, now she was realizing that this embarrassing scene was on her, Kitt’s, behalf.
“I agree, Posie,” Bruce said as he held on to Posie’s hand. “I already proposed, but she wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Now, Bruce.” Posie preened and let her eyelashes go into a flutter. “That’s only because she was working. Tell him, Kitt, you talk, can’t stop talking once you get going good on a subject you like, cooking for instance, now, Bruce, my daughter can sure ’nuff cook, can outcook me any day of the week, tell him, Kitt.”
Kitt didn’t answer.
“I mean even my grandbaby loves her mama’s cooking and my Sage is one picky eater, don’t you, baby?” Posie tickled Sage in the small of her back. “We’re just so proud of our darling, Sage.” She poked Sage, propelling her. “Show your mama how much you love her cooking.”
Sage ran to Kitt then and grabbed her around the waist and burrowed her head in her stomach, and as sometimes happened, Sage caught her mother off guard and Kitt lost her footing and they both would have landed on the floor except that Bruce was standing right there, arms opened like a wide receiver, so that Kitt ended up pressed against his heavily starched blue-and-white-striped shirt inhaling his unisex cologne with remnants of vanilla mixed in.
Posie stood back now, satisfied at the scene going on in the middle of Kitt’s living room. Kitt struggling to get her balance, Bruce pulling her off of her center so that she’d have to lean on him, Sage holding on to her mother, which amounted to pushing her even more against Bruce. Go ’head and push, Sage, Posie thought it so intensely that it was more a prayer than a thought. Because she reasoned that her daughter needed a man in her life so badly right now that Posie could taste the need herself and her own mouth would get dry and she’d roll her tongue around and get ready to find herself something soft and wet to quench her thirst until she remembered that she had a man, always someone coming and going in her world even at the age she was, that what she was feeling was just a sympathy dry mouth for her daughter’s needs. Just wasn’t natural to swear off men the way Kitt had done, probably why she was fixated on putting Verdi and Johnson back together, confusing her own nature with Verdi’s. And this one who Kitt was peeling herself from now, and apologizing to, and saying Sage is just sooo demonstrative sometimes, this one Posie could see had some nice arms under that blue-and-white-striped shirt, the best arms: strong, unmarried, holding-down-a-good-job kind of arms.
She was so filled with anticipatory excitement over this desirable potential of a mate for Kitt, she forgot all about what she’d wanted to tell her when she’d barged in on Kitt’s session. That Johnson had called. Asked that Kitt please call him first chance she got. She braced herself for the telling-off she was about to get as Kitt walked back in from the enclosed porch and Posie ran and grabbed Sage and fixed her eyes on Kitt to go wide and sad with a pleading to them. And Kitt just stood there and stared at her mother with that look that said that she couldn’t decide whether Posie was a blessing or a curse.
Kitt just shook her head and said, “Mama, you are just so pitiful.”
“I just can’t help myself, Kitt.” Posie rushed her words and made a steeple of hands and pressed them to her mouth and whispered, “Forgive your mama for being the way she is.”
Then Kitt looked at her watch, told Posie it was almost time for her breathing treatment. Then focused on Sage, tried to hold a stern face when she looked at her and said that before she took her grandmother’s side again she should remember who feeds her.
Sage barreled for her mother, arms outstretched, mouth wide open as if she were about to take flight. Undaunted. Many things were still a puzzle to her, especially why her thoughts melted into the bumps on her tongue no matter how hard she tried to make them stand up and march through her lips into words, but this one thing she knew for sure, the fiery glow around her mother when she set eyes her way, a warming blaze of colors that leaped and danced and chased off the cold, steely things like silvers and icy blues. She saw her mother’s love as a flame, felt it too as she pressed her head into the soft heat of Kitt’s stomach and closed her eyes tightly and allowed her mother’s glow to surround them both, all yellow and orange with a hint of brown and red. Posie joined in the hug and Kitt put her arm around her mother too, even as Posie’s hair that Kitt thought was way too long for a woman her age rubbed against her face, it was so soft against her face.
Kitt was the first to notice a change in Verdi that fall of ’71. Noticed it in the profound dearth of her contacts. Noticed that she and Posie had been eased out to the periphery. Knew that it was unlike Verdi to go for so long without calling and begging for Kitt to come visit her, or inviting herself over for a meal, or just calling and sighing into the phone, trusting that Kitt would be able to interpret the sighs and say something that would give her relief. But Verdi wasn’t calling and even when Kitt would call her and try to entice her over with mouthwatering descriptions of the pot of this or that she had working with Verdi’s name on it, Verdi declined, begging it off on all the booking she had to do. Kitt had even taken to sending covered plates down to Verdi’s dorm via Posie’s latest man. Felt as if the reasons for her dread over Verdi coming to school here were blooming to fruition, that Verdi would shut her out, defer to her charm-school upbringing, and begin to see Kitt as an embarrassment, a practical nurse with a basic high-school diploma in home economics who had never even been presented at a debutantes’ ball. She could have accepted the ouster from someplace far, had Verdi enrolled in a school in the south, but from right in the same city, almost down the street only two miles away, was too close, so close that just the thought was breaking Kitt’s heart.
“I wonder why we haven’t heard from Verdi Mae,” Kitt had been saying to Posie almost every day for the past month, unable to disguise the hurt in her voice. But in what Kitt considered a rare bout of wisdom coming from her mother, Posie had cautioned Kitt that once Verdi became entrenched in university life it might feel as if they were losing her for a while, that Verdi was in fact embarking on a lifestyle that they didn’t, couldn’t know. That they had to allow her space and time and not make her feel as if she had to choose campus or them, that Kitt and Verdi would always be close as sisters, but for right now Kitt had to let Verdi be.
And Kitt had let Verdi be. Never mailed the letter she penned telling Verdi to just forget they were blood if she insisted on ignoring her so; didn’t demand otherwise when Verdi’s floor mates kept Kitt holding on the phone for five, ten minutes at a time only to return saying that Verdi couldn’t come to the phone right now; refused to go down to that campus even, especially after the gathering in the high-rise dorm when she’d suffered through fifteen minutes of Verdi’s history professor eyeing her up and down with a discernible upper-crust disdain. Kitt had decided that socializing with her cousin would have to happen on her home court so that she could have the advantage of familiarity.
But now she discarded that resolution. Decided about seven one Friday evening that she could no longer stand the torture of waiting to hear from Verdi. That she’d have to examine her in the flesh herself and allow Verdi’s eyes to tell her what she thought the dearth of contact already had told her, that Verdi no longer wanted Kitt in her life. “Tomorrow morning,” Kitt told Posie, “I don’t care what you say, Mama, I’m getting on that D bus and going to check up on our girl.” But then she remembered that she didn’t have anything to wear, remembered how incongruous she’d felt at that gathering in the high-rise when she’d worn one of her pleated kilt skirts from high school, one of Posie’s low-cut ruffled blouses. Moaned as she piled her bed high with her closet’s offerings of doesn’t-matter-what-they-look-like clothes because she wore a uniform to work, the rest were clothes for wearing to church, an occasional sequined number for being dragged to a cabaret in when Posie got it in her mind every so often to help Kitt find a boyfriend.
Posie sauntered in and out of Kitt’s now disheveled bedroom every fifteen minutes or so offering her oversized pearls, or tight mohair sweaters, or rhinestone-studded belts. And after a string of “no,” “no thank you, mama,” “no way you’ve got to be crazy if you think I’m wearing that, Mama,” Kitt tried to explain to the confused look in Posie’s doe eyes that she needed something collegiate looking. “You know, kind of hippieish, but toned down.”
And then Posie sighed and said that if she really thought that it was that important, even though personally she thought that Kitt could show up in a burlap wrap and Verdi would still be thrilled to see her, but if it would make her feel not so sad about herself, she should just have to hop on the el and try to catch Lit Brothers before they closed. And Kitt said that she didn’t have that much money, that she had put most of her paycheck in the bank. And Posie left the room and came back then and pressed three twenties in her hand, told her to hurry so that she would make the store. And when Kitt asked if Posie’s boyfriend the limo driver could give her a fast ride up there, Posie lowered her head and flashed a smile that vacillated between embarrassed and naughty, said, “Mama got to keep him here with me, baby. You know, got to give him a proper thank-you for those twenties he was so generous and easy about giving up.”
“Mama,” Kitt dragged the word out, “why you put yourself in that position on my account?”
Posie fingered Kitt’s collar, moved her hand down to let it rest over Kitt’s heart. “I really do feel it here, baby. What I’m doing is not so bad long as I feel it here. Mama hopes one day you’ll understand what I’m saying, then maybe you won’t think so poorly of me.”
Kitt couldn’t respond. Was too filled with the mix of pride and disdain that her mother’s actions aroused in her, her ability to melt her and harden her at the same time. She wanted to hug Posie for her motives, slap her for her deeds. Settled on a quick peck on the cheek but no verbal thank-you as she rushed out of the house to catch the store.
She shivered at the bus stop on her way to Sixty-ninth Street and wondered what college must feel like, to have your smartness constantly reinforced by being surrounded with ivy and books and the right to protest the war. Kitt thought herself to be smart, though in a different way from Verdi. Thought it was a shame that there wasn’t a campus for people like her, gifted when it came to knowing how to survive. Thought that she’d surely have gone to a major university had she been born to Verdi’s mother, Hortense. So gathered up Hortense was in her mind; like a vase of show roses—Hortense had vision, knew the paths to take where the best blooms were, knew to carry her shears for snipping them off. Tried to instill some of that vision in Kitt when it was her turn to spend summers in the south. Would pull her aside maybe at night when Verdi was asleep, would whisper, “Aunt Hortense would love to see you learn the piano, or take a ballet class, or go to Paris, or wear white lacy gloves, would pay for it myself but your mama’s so hard-hearted when it comes to me, we’re fortunate she lets us have you every other summer.” She’d go on then to give Kitt instruction on men, how necessary it is to train a man how to treat you, she’d tell Kitt, and how to spot the ones who weren’t even worth the instruction. “A man who doesn’t melt over you like hot wax, so that you can remold him into what he needs to be, will bring you nothing but frustration,” she’d insist. “Like a man who walks on the inside and allows you to walk next to the curb is never worth your time,” she’d insist as she stressed to Kitt over and over the importance of always keeping her head even if her emotions were in a spin. “That’s your mama’s problem,” she’d say. “Poor thing just loses her head over and over again. You got a good head, Kitt. I see in you what I don’t even see in the one I birthed, promise Aunt Hortense you’ll always keep your head.” Kitt so valued her private time with her aunt, wished that her aunt Hortense had been her mother instead, would daydream about it even, until Posie’s breathing condition scared her so, filled her with guilt that it was her wishing that had caused it, banished those fantasies about being raised by Hortense to the deepest pouches in her mind, except that every now and then she opened the pouch just a sliver; she did right now, just for a minute or two, as she made it into Lit Brothers with twenty minutes to spare.
She found her way to the department where Jesus Christ Superstar was pumping through the speakers. Hurriedly selected a tan suede jacket with fringes and a pair of bell-bottomed jeans with an American flag seared on the knees. Walked through the shoe department on her way out of the store and tried on a pair of tan suede boots, also fringed, they fit like skin and she bought those too, even though the salesman was flirting overtly, asking for her number, telling her how her beautiful legs really made the boots. And she tiredly told him unless he was giving the boots away to please stop, that she didn’t believe in playing and paying. She tried not to think about her mother as she counted the change, probably upstairs wiping her bedroom walls with the limo driver right now.
She was nervous the next morning as she sat at a booth in the back of a restaurant just up the street from Verdi’s dorm. Had called Verdi and told her to get her butt over there right that instant so that she could look her over and make sure that some evil campus witch hadn’t cursed her and made her grow two heads or some such thing long as it had been since she’d heard from her. That she’d promised Aunt Hortense she’d look out for her. “So come on, right here, right now,” she’d demanded.
She’d listened for signs of disappointment in Verdi’s voice when she’d shouted, “Kitt, oh my gosh, you’re here, right up the street, sit tight please, I’ll be right there.” Had to admit that she’d heard only a shocked gladness. Was relieved, really.
And now she sipped her coffee and took small nibbles from buttered toast iced with Concord-grape jelly. Then she heard a throat clearing, followed by that familiar giggle filled with naïveté that would make Kitt want to rush in and protect, and Kitt looked up and there Verdi stood, groggy, half hung over after another night of stretching her parameters with Johnson, but obviously excited to see Kitt. And Kitt took one look at her, sleep flaking from the corners of her eyes, hastily put-on tam covering her uncombed hair, face naked of lipstick or blush, and saw not just her cousin, but this beautiful woman, all grown up and beaming, as if the heavens had just opened and spilled light all around her as she grinned down at the booth where Kitt sat sporting her new suede jacket.
“Lord have mercy,” Kitt said, shaking her head slowly, letting the toast drop into the saucer as she studied Verdi down to her sockless feet, who right now couldn’t keep her teeth behind her lips, nor stop the reddish tinge from pulsing beneath her brown-over-gold skin. “You’re all messed up in the head.”
“Huh?” Verdi said, unable to contain a stream of giggles.
“In love, girl. Strung out, nose wide open, heart on your sleeve, feet off the ground, head in the sky, infatuated, probably sex-saturated. How else can I say it. You are seriously, dangerously, not-keeping-your-head in love.”
“I am, Kitt.” Verdi squeezed into the booth next to her and banged the table and threw her head back and laughed. “I am, I am, Lord help me because I am. I am. I am. I don’t even know what to do with myself, you know it’s like I’m in a perpetual dreamy state. I wake up, I go to class, I eat, I study, I go to bed at night, and his presence, whether or not he’s with me, you know his presence is with me, prominently, he’s just on my mind and all I really want to do is just be with him.” She took a sip of Kitt’s coffee, a bite from the toast, and spit crumbs out as she talked so fast and excitedly. “He’s so, he’s different, Kitt. Not corny like the boys back home, you know, not all materialistic. He’s got substance, you know he’s into the BSL. Not hardly the type of man Mama would choose for me, or even you.” She stopped then and looked at Kitt, as if prior to now she’d just been talking to the bacon-scented air in this restaurant that felt cozy and safe because it was nearly empty, being before noon on a Saturday and rarely did students start flowing in until one or two. And Kitt’s face was guarded like she’d never seen it before, as if she had to defend her face from some hurt that was threatening to shadow it, and she realized then how she’d been shutting Kitt out, barely returning her calls or dialing her number unprompted to say hello, to ask how her aunt Posie was, to invite herself over for a meal, or even to thank her for the hot plates she’d send down by Posie’s man a couple of times a month. She felt herself getting filled up at the thought of how long it had been since she had unburdened herself to Kitt. Nowhere else had she experienced the type of honesty and trust that she’d known with Kitt and now it was affecting her because she’d been so distracted since she’d been at the university, worse than that even, she’d been stingy, miserly, with her attention when it came to Kitt of all people, the one whose generosity toward the people she cared about had always been amazingly boundless.
“Kitt, Kitt, I really want you to meet him, you know,” Verdi said as she coughed and took another sip of Kitt’s coffee to untighten her throat. “I hope you’ll love him because that’s important to me. And I’m sorry I haven’t called, honest.” She stopped and swallowed and tried not to cry. “It’s just that my time, my focus, I’m—I’m just so scared because I feel like I’m not in control, you know, like is this something I shouldn’t even be doing, and yet I can’t stop myself. I just want him, you know what I mean? I just want to be with him, I’m just so, I’m so wide open and it’s so scary. It is. And on top of everything I miss Mama and Daddy and Aunt Posie, and you, I especially miss you.” Now she was crying. “I didn’t even know how much I’ve missed you until right now.” She covered her face with her hands and then fell into Kitt’s arms.
Kitt just listened and then patted the hiccups that came up in Verdi’s back as she sobbed. She didn’t nudge her away even though Verdi was raining on her new collegiate-looking jacket, the one that she’d hoped would keep her from embarrassing Verdi in front of her Ivy League friends, keep her from showing up looking like her uneducated cousin from the slums. She rubbed circles in Verdi’s back thinking how relieved she was now that she had popped up on Verdi unannounced to see for herself. Now she could concede that Posie had been right. It wasn’t that Verdi had become so enthralled with the university after all, it wasn’t that she no longer felt enamored of Kitt and Posie, it wasn’t that she looked down on them, or was embarrassed by them. She was simply, wildly in love.
“What you do, girl, get drunk last night?” Kitt asked finally as she continued to sweep Verdi’s back in wide circles. “You know that cheap fruity wine you college students drink will make you cry when you should be laughing, laugh when you should be crying. Have you praising the devil and cursing the Lord and trying to figure out which is which between your ass and a hole in the ground.” She felt Verdi strangling against her as her sobbing tried to turn to giggles and then back to sobs. “See what I tell you. You don’t know what to feel, and once you figure that out, you don’t know how to act appropriate to what you feeling.”
Verdi lifted her head and rubbed her eyes. “You’re right, Kitt, I don’t know how to act, but it’s not from wine, it’s from everything being so new, you know living on my own, making my own decisions, I mean there’s so much freedom here, no curfew, you know, the dorm rules such as they are aren’t enforced, I mean it’s a coed dorm as it is and there are, you know, couples who actually live together right in the open. You know, there was some comfort in all the structure Mama put on me; and she’s not here to tell me what to do, what to wear, who my friends should or shouldn’t be, even though I have good friends, one sister, Cheryl from Texas, lives upstairs from me, we’re close, and actually, Barb, the white girl who lives next door to me, is very cool, we’ve actually hung out—” She stopped mid-sentence as she fingered the collar of Kitt’s jacket. “My goodness, Kitt,” she said, her voice going up a full octave, “this is a really nice jacket, I mean really nice, you must have caught some sale because I know you don’t believe in spending money on clothes. And look, I cried all over it,” she whined as she picked up a napkin and dabbed at the wet parts. “And it’s a good suede too, why you let me do that?”
“It’s just a jacket.” Kitt brushed off the compliment, embarrassed now that she’d gone to such an extreme as rushing out to buy a new jacket just to venture down on campus, as if such a gesture had even been necessary with Verdi. She pushed Verdi’s hand away. “Well, don’t go getting all comfortable about being so much on your own,” she said to redirect the conversation. “I talked to Aunt Hortense this morning; she called from the airport; she’s on her way to campus right now. Probably be waiting for you in the lobby when you get back.”
“Huh!” Verdi gasped and shrieked at the same time.
“Gotcha,” Kitt said. Now she threw her head back and laughed. “I wish I had my Polaroid to snap that horrified look that just came up on your face.” She gasped and coughed. The laughter felt good even as it choked her. Meant her chest was opening up. “What? That Negro’s probably laying up in your bed right now, isn’t he?”
Verdi fell heavily against the booth and let out a loud relieved breath. “Damn, Kitt, you ready to give me heart failure. I was thinking I was gonna have to call Barb or Cheryl, tell them to knock on my door—”
“So he is up there, isn’t he? Don’t lie to me, girl, or I’ll tell on you. You know you can’t lie straight anyhow.”
Verdi blushed and hunched her shoulders and looked at Kitt undereyed and then couldn’t contain the smile that took over her face. “Oh-oh, Kitt, why don’t you come up and meet him right now, come on, I really want you to.”
“Girl, please.” Kitt drew the “please” out to three syllables and took a gulp of coffee. “What are you talking about, you’re talking crazy. Shucks, if I want to see some half-sleep man who’s spent the better part of the night getting his rocks off, all I have to do is go back home and walk in my mama’s bedroom.”
They both laughed and then Verdi got quiet, serious, fingered the fringes on Kitt’s jacket. “You know, I really understand what Aunt Posie was experiencing when I used to spend summers there and she was in one of her enraptured states and floating instead of walking, sighing instead of breathing, just agreeing absentmindedly to everything we wanted.”
Kitt rolled her eyes up in her head, said she sure as hell hoped Verdi wasn’t turning into Posie. “I mean a really great love should come only once or twice in life, maybe three times to a die-hard romantic, but not over and over and over again like it does with Mama.” They both grabbed for the coffee cup at the same time and Kitt told Verdi to go on and finish it since she’d already slobbered and cried in it anyhow. “And order me a fresh cup,” she said as she swirled a crust of toast around in the dish of jelly. “And if you really want me to meet this man that’s got you laughing and crying at the same time,” she said, “go get him. I’ll wait right here. We all three can have a proper get-acquainted breakfast. He can treat.” She saw Verdi’s face dent in and out when she said the part about him treating. She realized then that he couldn’t treat. That Verdi had come all the way from Atlanta on her parents’ good graces and money to one of the most prestigious schools in the country and fallen head over heels in love with a poor boy. Aunt Hortense will just shit over this, she thought as Verdi drained the coffee cup and then jumped up saying that they’d be right back. “But my mama,” Kitt said out loud as she watched Verdi’s back go through the restaurant door. “My poor misdirected, overly hormoned, melodramatic mama will be so very proud.”
Kitt and Johnson did take a liking to each other. As Kitt watched Verdi and Johnson float into her view through the restaurant’s storefront windows, and after she took note to make sure Johnson walked on the outside and protected Verdi from the curb, and then saw them almost saunter through the restaurant door hand in hand, she appreciated Johnson’s scuffed-up leather jacket, his faded sweatshirt where the U emblazoned on the chest had washed out from red to almost brown, and though she could tell that he had the potential to drag one foot behind him and stroll like a jitterbug as he stepped aside to let Verdi walk first through the narrow aisle toward the booth where she sat, his walk right now was straight, tall, respectful with a tenuousness about it like his face was tenuous; his face handsome though in an asymmetrical way, with his long chin made longer by his goatee and mustache and slightly off-centered nose, and his dark eyes that were dashing this way and that, moving through the restaurant, she could tell, looking to find her.
Johnson was struck by Kitt’s pleasing features as well, knew immediately that was her even before Verdi stretched out her arm from Kitt to him and back again as if she were presenting royalty, could tell by the stark resemblance between Verdi and Kitt. Both with those deeply etched cheekbones, and downward-cast eyes, and soft-looking cushions to the lips. Except that Kitt appeared older, stronger than Verdi, especially now as she sat leaned back against the booth, arms folded tightly across her chest, one eyebrow arched way up that gave a half scowl to her face as she looked beyond Verdi to get to him; he guessed she was thinking something like, Let me check this Ivy League Negro out and see what he’s up to with my cousin. He liked that, was glad that Verdi had at least one other person in this town watching her back. Still he figured he’d better pull his best manners from his pocket and wear them like kid leather gloves if he were going to have a shot at maybe causing her to lower her eyebrow and softening that scowl on her face. He knew the importance that Verdi attached to Kitt’s perceptiveness when it came to reading someone’s character, knew how badly Verdi wanted Kitt’s blessings, knew she’d probably pressured Kitt as much she had him to be nice. “Please,” she’d begged on their walk over. “My cousin is the most honest, generous, down-to-earth person I know. You’ll love her, I’m sure of it, so just please be nice.”
Kitt and Johnson didn’t need to be pressured. There really was a natural energy between them as they shook hands and looked each other up and down and confirmed that neither was threatening to the other. Then suddenly, in the same instant it seemed, they both recognized that they’d known each other briefly but significantly in their childhoods.
“Didn’t you go to Hamilton?” they asked simultaneously.
And the anticipation of this first meeting melted into the memory of the powerful slice of history they shared at Hamilton Elementary School. Kitt was in fifth grade, Johnson was in sixth. And a rumor was whipping through the upper grades about Kitt’s mother and Johnson’s father: Johnson’s father had recently left home; packed his bag and told his wife simply that he needed to be free. He took a room over top of Punchy’s Seafood restaurant on Fifty-second Street, and one Friday—so the elementary-school kids said—at 6:30 sharp, Posie slunk into Punchy’s wearing spiked heels and a fake three-quarter-length leopard coat, and sat at the counter and ordered two dozen batter-dipped fried shrimp. Johnson Senior emerged from the darkened staircase that led to his room, and whispered in Posie’s ear loud enough for the waitress to hear—an older sister of a Hamilton sixth-grader—that if she wanted to maybe listen to some Lou Rawls while her shrimp was frying he had a stack of 45s sitting on his spindle upstairs just waiting to fall. And according to the sixth-grader’s waitress sister, the two dozen shrimp got cold waiting for Posie to come down from Johnson Senior’s room even though they’d been double-wrapped in foil and kept next to the flame of the gas-burning stove. And the rumor got so hot, so inflated, that it bounced around the chipped plastered ceilings of the third floor of Hamilton School where the fifth-and sixth-grade classes were. And after a few more Fridays passed they were saying that Posie had taken to coming into Punchy’s earlier, four o’clock, before the rush-hour crowd came with their orders for fried fish. And Johnson Senior was already sitting at the counter waiting for her, had already placed her order, and they’d sprinkle their shrimp with pepper and hot sauce, and feed each other until they were down to nibbling on each other’s hands. And by the time they were done a crowd would have assembled, egging them on in the distinctively loud voices of those who’ve worked hard all week and can finally let loose in a Friday-evening, eagle-flying, scotch-and-soda-and-shrimp kind of way. And according to the sixth-grader’s waitress sister, Posie seemed to glow in the attention, would get more outrageous during their feedings, even licking Johnson Senior’s arms up to the elbow. Until one Friday Posie walked through the door in that three-quarter-length fake leopard only this time the spots didn’t stop with the coat, her legs were also spotted, her hands, even her face. This time, they said, she made purring sounds while she and Johnson Senior fed each other batter-dipped fried shrimp to the cheers and jeers of just-got-paid happy onlookers. And then after she had tasted Johnson Senior’s sweat as much she could, having gone beyond his elbow this time, and growled while she devoured his neck with both teeth and tongue, this time, the sixth-grader swore that her waitress sister swore that Posie unbuttoned the three-quarter-length fake leopard, and was butt naked underneath, except that it was hard to tell at first because leopard spots that matched the coat had been painted over her entire body. But when Punchy’s other men patrons realized the nature of the cat woman before them, they told Johnson that if he didn’t go for it, they surely would. And a few even started coming out of their jackets and even shirts until Johnson Senior beat them to it, and according to the waitress, who swore to her sixth-grade sister on a stack of Bibles, Posie and Johnson Senior did it right there in the middle of Punchy’s Seafood floor. The rumor became like air at Hamilton Elementary; it was everywhere, just inhaled by the older students who understood what a nasty thing had happened between Johnson’s father and Kitt’s mother. When either Johnson or Kitt walked by a group of assembled classmates they were met with “meows” and purrs, and scratching sounds, because these children were avid Batman fans and had studied well the sounds that Cat Woman made. Then one day Johnson saw Kitt on the landing in the back stairwell that was reserved for fire drills but Johnson had started using it to avoid the throngs of teasers who crowded up and down the main staircase. Kitt was moving quickly down the stairs and she looked so strong and lonely from the back and he had to take the steps three at a time to catch her. “Hey, hey, Kitt,” he’d called, but she kept her swift descent going. “I want you to know that my father’s allergic to shellfish, so they’re lying, or my father would be dead right now.” She’d stopped then, turned and looked up at him; they looked at each other with a straight-on directness that was unusual for children their age.
“And my mother doesn’t own a leopard coat, fake, three-quarter-length, or otherwise,” she said. And they both just stood there, silence reverberating between them, chests heaving, tears welling up. They both knew it to be a fact that their parents had taken up with each other, not at Punchy’s over batter-dipped fried fish, but Kitt had walked in on Johnson Senior and her mother holding hands in the living room of their second-floor apartment; Johnson had seen Posie leaving Punchy’s through the side door that led up to his father’s rented room. And even though Posie and Johnson Senior broke it off after less than a couple of months anyhow, and the rumor dissipated and dissolved into the next salacious story to titillate hyperactive prepubescent fifth-and sixth-graders, and even though Johnson and Kitt never really interacted after that afternoon, they had connected in that darkened stairwell in a way that their youth would not permit them to understand. It was a connection that resurfaced now as they marveled at the uncanniness that they should have Verdi in common.
“You’re Johnson’s son,” Kitt said with certainty.
“You’re Posie’s daughter.” Johnson matched her confident-she-was-right tone with his own brand of voice pulled up from his stomach.
They laughed then, slapped hands. Hugged. Pointed at each other and laughed some more. And when Verdi bounced up and down because she couldn’t contain her excitement over Kitt and Johnson finally meeting, and asked, “What? What is it?” Kitt and Johnson both paused, as if they both sensed how easily they could slip into a fractious, contentious vein even growing to hate each other forced to compete bitterly for Verdi’s affections if they didn’t have some other point of alliance between them that had nothing to do with Verdi. They read in each other’s eyes at that moment the need to keep their original bonding scenario unspoken, and in so doing undiluted.
“It’s nothing,” Kitt said as she squeezed Johnson’s hand and laughed some more.
“Well, how do you know each other’s parents?” Verdi asked, looking from Kitt to Johnson, amusement and confusion competing for expression on her face.
“Just that your aunt Posie was the, um, pretzel lady at our school,” Johnson said.
“And your, um, boyfriend? Is that appropriate college lingo? Anyhow his father bought a lot of pretzels.”
Johnson chuckled and winked at Kitt and kissed Verdi on the lips. And Verdi decided that it didn’t matter, that all that mattered right now was that two of the people she cared most about were seeming to be beyond the uncomfortably stiff formality that could kill a friendship even while it was budding.
“Well, let me tell you”—Kitt rushed her words—“Johnson here had one hell of a funny-shaped head back in elementary school.”
“And I mean no disrespect,” Johnson said then, “but your cousin was kind of, you know, fat.”
Kitt punched Johnson’s arm as if they’d been close for years and they all three laughed and spread themselves out in the back booth and sealed their closeness over omelettes and grits and mounds of breakfast meats.
And Kitt liked Johnson so much that she insisted on paying for breakfast that morning, told them to just pretend that the breakfast took place at her kitchen table which she’d been planning to do anyhow if she could get an occasional callback from Verdi. Framing her paying in those terms made it acceptable. Saved Johnson the embarrassment of having to spend money no doubt slipped to him by Verdi; Kitt had been on those kinds of dates before when the man was nice as Cooter Brown and twice as broke, and she’d want to at least split the bill but their maleness took it as a personal affront that the woman should pay and she’d sit there and watch them squirm and even pull up nickels from the lining of their pants to piece together enough to cover the tab.
But Johnson seemed not to mind that Kitt was paying, seemed not to mind most things Kitt suggested, even when she’d call and tell Verdi to send Johnson up to her house when he got some time, that Posie’s limo driver had bowed out on her, “surprise, surprise,” she’d say jokingly, and this new man of Posie’s was blind in one eye and couldn’t drive and she’d cooked way too much of this or that and could they help take some of it off of her hands. Johnson was glad to go. And he’d feel a calming need to open up descend as he and Kitt always started off talking about elementary school while Kitt spooned out the plates and double-wrapped them in wax paper and carefully taped the sides. And before long the topics would turn to things more contemporary, sometimes Posie would even be in the kitchen, would join in with her odd mix of wit, wisdom, and immaturity that tickled Johnson so. It wasn’t uncommon for them to chatter for an entire hour after the bags of food were packed. And sometimes Johnson would stop by there even if there was no offer of food as an enticement, if he’d just been to see his mother and needed to thin out his sadness before he went back to campus. And Posie and Kitt welcomed him with laughs and hugs and made much over his arrival as if Johnson was becoming the son Posie should have had, the brother Kitt needed.
Kitt and Johnson were spawning such a pure honesty between them and they’d find themselves telling each other things that heretofore had remained caged and locked in their own minds. Johnson and his feelings of inferiority when it came to being able to treat Verdi in the first-class kind of way she’d grown up with. Kitt and her regret that she’d never had a shot at college, at least that’s what the guidance counselors told her when they placed her in the home-economics track. Johnson and the call he sometimes got for the street, that as much as he had an aversion for the type of lifestyle that brought his brother down, he was still drawn at least to some of the people who’d been friends with his dead brother; he was so fascinated by their honor-among-thieves credo. Kitt and her fear that she’d never fall head over heels the way Verdi had with him, the way Posie did every other month; she loved her mother dearly, she told him, but was so afraid of becoming like Posie that she’d hold back even with decent prospects; always she’d hold back.
And sometimes after they’d talked so long until they were drained in a satisfied kind of way and Johnson would linger over a Kool filter tip, they’d pick up each other’s eyes through the smoke, and something that would approach a physical attraction would try to taint the air between them and make it go common and low. They knew to disregard it, to not even dignify it by heightening it to a stature that would make it worth considering. They both loved Verdi too much to let the bad air form itself into a thought to be pondered, the commission of a low-down act to be considered. And as they were beginning to realize, they loved each other too in a way that was so honest and so pure that they’d never risk toppling it because some nefarious stream of chemistry decided to show itself in the smoke of a Kool filter-tip cigarette.
But even with all of his self-disclosures, Johnson still kept to himself the taste of thunder, that manifestation of the storm cloud that would start in his stomach and rise up into his chest like reflux from a too-spicy meal until the hot embers regurgitated and singed the skin along his jaw. It was especially strong during the three-and-a-half-week Christmas break and Verdi had gone home, even though she’d begged her parents to let her stay on campus and had almost had her father ready to relent until Hortense grabbed the phone, voice cracking, insisting that she needed her baby home, that she’d get physically ill if she had to endure the holidays without her, that it was enough that they’d allowed her Thanksgiving with Kitt, but she’d rather she just pounce on her heart than deny her Christmas with her only child. And it was a teary good-bye when Johnson loaded Verdi into the cab headed to the airport that Christmas Eve, and his dorm felt like a mausoleum with Tower and Moose and everybody else he might interact with gone home too. And he felt like the right thing to do was to go home and spend Christmas Eve with his mother, not that he wanted to, but that was certainly the right thing to do. And he put a sweater on under his scuffed-up leather jacket and decided to walk. Had walked past the empty frat houses and the closing-early hoagie and steak shops that serviced the campus, and the off-campus apartment buildings with their iron-gated windows, and the Acme and the Presbyterian church, and then the blurring that happened between the campus and the neighborhood where the structures looked the same but the people scurrying in and out were now worlds apart, one being trained to take over the world—or at least to take it on; the other, well, to the other this small patch of the city was the world. And he felt so wide-legged at this point on his trek up, straddling the worlds, when he was fully on campus he was sure West Philly was where he belonged, and when he was at home, he was sure his rightful place was on campus, but right around this spot where the boundaries overlapped he was at home nowhere. He hurried across the imaginary divide and now had another mile to go and the sun was beginning to drop and the air out here was growing teeth and he pulled his skull cap farther down over his ’fro to at least meet his ears, and he wasn’t wearing gloves, he didn’t own gloves. And now he was right in front of the three-story house where Bug lived, his dead brother’s best friend, and he thought what the hell, he’d extend holiday greetings and in the process thaw his hands.
Bug’s real name was Anthony and when he was small everybody called him Ant for short but as he got older, bigger and tougher and delinquent, and learned how to fight with banister posts, he changed his nickname to Bug because he thought Ant sounded girlish and threatened to kick ass if anybody called him that again. Bug and Johnson’s brother Fred had been best friends from kindergarten. They were supposed to go to Vietnam together under the inducement of enlisting under the buddy system that assured they’d be platoon mates, but Bug failed the physical, was diagnosed with hepatitis, and they wouldn’t let Fred unenlist.
Bug repeated that story to Johnson now as he ushered him into his dimly lit third-floor apartment and hugged him and clenched his teeth in the middle of telling Johnson how much he looked like Fred standing there. “That should have been me in that chopper with him, you know that don’t you, Johnson. We was bloods, man, seriously, man.”
And Johnson nodded and was not as adept as Bug at holding back the tears and asked to use his john. When he’d gotten himself sufficiently together he walked back into the living room via the kitchen where the table was loaded down with a balance beam scale and plastic Baggies and a shoe box filled with weed. He got a flashback then of the first time he’d smoked a joint sitting on a crate in the empty lot around the corner from his house. It was the summer between tenth and eleventh grade and it was Bug who’d turned him on, taught him how to roll it, how to hold it in until he coughed. And then Fred came up on him, knocked him in the head so hard the joint flew out of his mouth, told him to take his ass home, told Bug, “He’s going to college, man, he don’t need to be doing that shit.”
Bug and Johnson were on the same wavelength because he repeated that story to Johnson as he offered him a seat on his orange vinyl couch under the Lava light–enhanced Jimi Hendrix poster. He was bursting in fact with stories about Fred that had Johnson in stitches and then tears as he and Bug passed a continuous stream of joints between them. And Johnson was so caught up he lost track of time as Bug introduced him to dimensions about his brother that he’d never known. For this space of time that he sat on Bug’s orange vinyl couch and smoked joints and laughed through Bug’s vivid recollections about all the hell they raised, his brother wasn’t really dead. And especially when he wasn’t laughing, when Bug’s stories turned searing in their revelations about his brother’s true nature, it was as if his brother was sitting right next to him on the couch, telling him to move the fuck over, that real men didn’t sit so their bodies touched even as he had his arm around Johnson’s shoulder. He was enraptured by the time Bug told the story of how he and Fred were caught shoplifting model airplane kits from the five-and-ten when they were in their early teens, “only caught our asses because your softhearted brother stopped in the middle of our getaway to chase down some common thief who’d just snatched some old lady’s purse. ‘Why? Why you do such a foolish-assed thing?’ I asked him all night that long night we spent in the Youth Study Center. And you know what he said, told me he had principles, that he was just liberating that model airplane, that everybody paid for that stolen airplane and what’s twenty-nine cents split a million ways, but if that woman would have lost her purse that probably held her expense money for the month, only she would have paid, and that ain’t right, ain’t fair worth a damn. You know he turned it into a political act. That’s what I loved about your brother, he had a heavy understanding. You dig where I’m coming from, Johnson?”
Johnson did, even appreciated his brother’s ambivalence when Bug related how his brother had dabbled in the Black Panther Party, but knew he’d have to commit with his life and wasn’t sure if he was willing to give his life for it. “Aint that a shit,” Bug said, choking on sobs. “He still ended up giving his life, just that the movement he gave it for wasn’t even his own.”
Johnson got up to leave then, asked Bug how he planned on spending Christmas.
“I’m hanging around and dealing a little weight, man. Christmas is so much bullshit but it’s good for business, especially with all you college students converging again on the neighborhood. That pound I got on the table be gone by this time tomorrow night, man. So I’m just hanging and selling. Stop on through if you of the mind to over the holiday. Or anytime, man. You my young blood. Anytime.”
And Johnson knew he would stop back again. Thought that Bug might even step in and fill the oversized shoes his brother wore. Especially after he got home and his mother had already gone to bed, a card for Johnson propped up against her tabletop Christmas tree, the tree leaning, all the heaviest bulbs on one side. He tenderly rearranged the bulbs to balance them. The bulbs were thin-skinned and fragile in his weather-worn hands and he took his time. When he finished he sat down in the plastic-covered armchair facing the tree. Plugged the tree in and watched the lights blink on and off. The bulbs reflected a near-perfect symmetry. He thought about Verdi. Cried.