Already Verdi could feel the levity inside of her that happened whenever she approached Kitt’s house. Even though the fine drizzle was keeping the air more gray than yellow today, the clouds seemed not even to be as heavy when she turned onto Sansom Street. Partly because this block was such a diamond even in the 1990s, thanks to Kitt’s tenaciousness, her political activism. Though portions of West Philly had slid in property value like skis down an icy slope, there were no abandoned houses on Kitt’s block, no litter or graffiti, no peeling paint, no hedges out of control, no drug corners or Stop ’n’ Cop Beer Marts within a two-block radius, and the empty lot on the corner had been transformed into a vivacious urban garden that made Kitt’s house such a joy to approach.
Not that Verdi was unhappy when she approached the house she shared with Rowe; she filled her space nicely with Rowe; was happy the way air inside of a voluminous crate is happy, protected, right angle to right angle. Not buoyant though. At Kitt’s she was buoyant. Especially now as she started up the steps to Kitt’s house, and here was her slice of sunshine, Sage, jumping up and down and clapping when she saw Verdi and squealing and trying to say her name, gasping as spit dripped down her chin as she blew out the V sound, forcing it out, trying to make the whole name come out with the “Ve.” But the whole name wouldn’t come out, and Sage stomped her feet in frustration.
“That’s okay, Sage,” Verdi soothed as Sage bounded onto the enclosed porch, her arms wide open, and Verdi dropped her briefcase and scooped Sage up and squeezed her as if it had been weeks since she’d seen her. Though it had just been hours, just since 2:45 when she’d escorted Sage’s class to the waiting school bus, the way she escorted all of her students at the end of the day, and greeted them all first thing in the morning. Had been criticized for being too hands-on as a principal by the vocal few who resented Verdi hurtling over the vice principal already in place to get the principal’s slot, had been told to her face that she was interrupting the emotional attatchment that the children needed to have not for her but for their teachers. Wanted to do like Kitt would have done, wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but she was a consummate professional, told them it would take her time to retrain herself, after all this was only her first year out of the classroom and the tug to spend time with the children was stronger than her managerial inclinations.
“How’s my sugar lump?” Verdi said as she kissed Sage’s cheek with an exaggerated slurping sound and then eased her back down on the porch. She stooped to Sage’s eye level; what a perfect face this child had with that same grin as the cousins and the twins that involved her entire face and enchanted people so and shocked them too when they realized that Sage was different, special, that she hadn’t yet spoken her first word though she was seven, but even still she had surpassed all predictions of severe developmental delays, could point to her eyes and ears, and nose; if her mother said go upstairs and look in my top drawer and bring down my pink eyeglass case, she could do that too. Though she couldn’t yet read and write, and had a tendency to keep her fists balled, and sometimes reacted emotionally to strangers, she remained a puzzle to the medical community by how dramatically she’d surpassed their predictions, and yet she couldn’t talk.
Verdi put Sage’s hand against her jaw so that Sage could feel her muscles working. “Sugar,” she said, drawing the word out. “Sugar.”
“Verdi,” her aunt Posie said with the same exaggeration and then a laugh as she walked out onto the enclosed porch.
Verdi giggled and ran to Posie the way Sage had just greeted her. She mashed her lips against Posie’s cheek that smelled of Ponds cold cream and reminded Verdi of the chunks of her growing-up she’d spent with Posie and Kitt where she’d felt a sanctity she’d known in few other places.
Posie squeezed Verdi to her, felt the sharpness of her shoulder blades even through the taupe-colored trench coat. Stretched her back to arm’s length. “I hope you’re trying to hold on to what little weight you’re carrying, darling. Looks like you shed a few pounds in the couple of days since I last saw you. I mean you look good, don’t get Aunt Posie wrong, that brown highlights to that pixie haircut, I personally like you with a little more hair but you wearing that short style well now, looking good baby, like a piece of raspberry cheesecake, you do, sweet and well adorned, just sliced a bit too thin.”
“Oh Auntie, I know, I know, but everybody can’t be the stacked figure eight like you and Kitt,” Verdi said as she kissed Posie’s cheek again.
“True,” Posie said, and did a little twirl and a curtsy followed by Sage imitating her grandmother and they all three laughed. Though Kitt fussed often about her mother’s inability to age, to accept that she was no longer a twenty-year-old temptress, Verdi loved this about her aunt, was awestruck by how alluring Posie still was even at sixty.
“Kitt’s with her last client of the day and I’m sure not gonna be the one to go back there and tell her you’re here, so you might as well come on in and get comfortable, darling, and what may we thank as the reason for being graced with your presence two evenings in one week?” Posie said as she opened the door and held it and waited while Sage ran back to try to scoop up Verdi’s briefcase.
Posie nudged Verdi to tell her to look at Sage. “Told you that chile got plenty of sense,” she whispered to Verdi. “I do believe she’s gonna talk soon too. Keep working with her, Verdi Mae, I see the improvement just in the short time you been principal at her school.”
“Oh Auntie, you know I will now,” Verdi said as she went to help Sage with the briefcase, asking herself why was she back over here again this Friday anyhow; told herself that it was for the grilled salmon Kitt did on Fridays; wouldn’t admit to herself that it was for conversation about Johnson, so many questions she had about him: Had he married yet? Children? What about his eyes, did they still get that stony intenseness that used to move rapids through her?
“And how are things going on your job anyhow?” Posie sliced into Verdi’s stream of denial about why she was here. “You feeling more settled in with your new position?” she asked as Verdi shook off her taupe-colored raincoat and sank into the couch, and a more satisfied version of herself emerged like always when she got here, got to the easy unencumbered feel of this green corduroy couch, the peach flowered wallpaper that Kitt had hung herself, the lacy curtains she’d pleated from the tablecloths Verdi had brought her back from Mexico, the spotless coffee table, the sense of order here, not strained and calculated, but free-forming like a cha-cha that’s always on beat even when the feet misstepped.
“Gorgeous suit, Verdi Mae,” Posie said, before Verdi could answer. “You really looking the part of a principal in that navy silk suit, I tell you that much. ’Course I know it’s got to be hard making the switch like you did from teaching to leading. I remember when I was working at the dry cleaners, before my lungs started acting up and I had to go out on disability, and I was made the lead presser, and let me tell you, Verdi Mae, those other girls I’d been promoted over really showed their behinds, some used to be my friends too. Lord yes, went as far as accusing me of sleeping with the boss. People surely change up on you when you become the one in charge, even try to make you doubt your own fitness for the job you were selected to do.”
Verdi’s mouth dropped as she sat on the couch stroking Sage’s braids. It was almost as if her aunt knew the tussle she’d been having with herself over her new position. Was about to tell Posie about the blowup she felt she was building toward with her vice principal and her clique of supporters when the phone rang and Posie went to answer it, had her back to Verdi as she laughed out loud and walked into the dining room with the phone. And Verdi had the thought what if it was Johnson on the phone? She shook the thought, felt like she was betraying Rowe to think about Johnson, especially when her thoughts boarded a runaway train and she was seeing them together all sweaty and fused. Right now she focused on Sage instead, who had stretched herself out on the well-padded Berber carpet and was rolling her fat barrel-shaped crayons over construction paper. Verdi got down on the floor with Sage and said each color as Sage picked them up, scarlet, she said about the red one, and Sage held it up again, and Verdi laughed at herself, said it’s red, baby. Red. Though it was scarlet. The same color as the two dozen velvety roses Rowe had brought home last night apologizing for running his finger along Verdi’s vein like he’d done. He was so sincere and seemed almost shy, certainly embarrassed, and Verdi had melted, that softness pouring off of him reminded her why she had such great affection for him anyhow. She almost admitted then that she’d lied, that she wasn’t getting a manicure and a massage. She didn’t admit it though. Did resolve within herself to be honest from here on out when she spent time with Kitt. Told herself that she would call Rowe as soon as her auntie got off of the phone to tell him where she was. Resolved to pluck Johnson from her fantasies. Convinced herself now that she was here for a taste of Kitt’s grilled salmon.
Verdi was always able to discern Rowe’s softness. Even back when he taught her history. She’d gotten in the habit of sitting up front in the large lecture halls so that she wasn’t looking on the backs of the heads of the continuous tides of white people that sometimes made her feel as though they might rise up in a great wave and have her flailing around struggling not to drown, and the feeling was so intense that sometimes her chest would even go tight and from then on she was severely distracted from the lectures, so she was always right there within two feet of Rowe’s lectern for his course called the Crisis of the Union. And this one day as he held the lecture hall in his grip as he went around the room and pointed at people and in his bellowing voice asked them questions in order to determine whether they’d been listening, whether they’d done the readings, and he pointed at Verdi then, though his voice lost a degree of its menace: “According to the slave narratives, what was one of the most compelling psychological weapons used against the African male?”
Verdi looked first at her desk as her heart pounded in her ears, then at him, saw the loosening in the muscles of his jaw that were usually clamped so tightly together. “The emasculation factor,” she said, and after she’d spoken realized that she’d whispered.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” he asked as he moved from behind the lectern until he was standing almost directly over Verdi.
“Well.” She cleared her throat, forced herself to speak up, to look directly at him as she spoke. “It’s not stated explicitly in the narratives we’ve read, and is also conjecture on my part, but even worse than what is stated explicitly, the male slave being forced to watch other slaves brutalized, to take part in the brutalization, is the far more devastating weapon of the African male lying down with his wife knowing that she’s been with another man, albeit in a forced way, and that the other man is also his captor and has rendered him powerless to do anything about it. The fact that descriptions of those kinds of feelings are absent at least in our assigned readings leads me to believe that it was too devastating to even verbalize.”
He was quiet when she finished. Just stood there looking at her as if he’d been hypnotized, his jaw so slack now his mouth hung open slightly. “That was a courageous conjecture,” he said finally as he walked back to the lectern. “More of you should sit up here in the front row and absorb similar kinds of insights.”
He stopped Verdi on the way out, told her again how much he appreciated her comments. “Forgive me if I’m crossing the line,” he said as he folded papers into his briefcase. “But my wife’s nephew is visiting this weekend, a freshman also—Moorehouse man, but we won’t hold that against him.” They both laughed as he held the door open for Verdi to walk through. “Anyhow Penda and I were thinking about who we could invite over for dinner this Saturday, and Penda was so dazzled by your performance in her intro-to-ed-psych course last semester that we both said your name at the same time. But, Verdi, please don’t even look at this as a blind-date situation or anything that approaches that, and you can even think about it, let me know after class on Wednesday.”
And Verdi was thinking that it sounded benign enough, and she liked his wife Penda. And they were outside now, walking down the steps from College Hall, and there was an antiwar demonstration going on down on the grass with placards waving and people talking through megaphones. And Verdi easily picked out Johnson in the mostly white assemblage, and she knew how ambivalent he was about these demonstrations, having lost a brother who’d willingly enlisted. And she could see his distress all the way from where she was by the way he had his hand propped in his chin. Knew that he needed her. That he’d feel rejected if she spent Saturday evening with some Moorehouse man. She turned back to Rowe and smiled. Said, “I’m sorry, I have to decline, I already have plans for this weekend. But, well, I guess tell your nephew that I said hello anyhow.”
She shook the look of disappointment that came up in Rowe’s eyes as she ran down the steps to get to Johnson, to put her head against his chest, to warm his chest. It was chilly out here and he had his jacket wide open. Even as Rowe clenched his jaws again and watched her running, knew who she was running to. Thought it was such a waste.
But no matter what Rowe or anybody else thought, Verdi and Johnson had taken on glows of two people fiercely in love as they became increasingly like interlocking wood carvings, where one protruded the other dimpled to better accommodate the fusion. Johnson was spending so little time in his own dorm with Tower and the rest, and so much time in Verdi’s room that the night security just let him sign himself in without making him ring her room first. Verdi’s next-door neighbor, Barb, joked that Johnson should be allowed to attend the hall meetings since for all intents and purposes he lived there too. Verdi’s best friend Cheryl started seeing Johnson’s roommate, Tower, she said, just so that she might maybe catch a glimpse of Verdi if she happened to come by. They accepted the comments breezily though. Laughed, waved good-bye, closed the door to Verdi’s room where they had become accustomed to sharing one scrumptious meal after the next complete with candles and linen napkins. Sometimes they mmmed and aahed over spaghetti and meatballs or livers smothered in onions carefully prepared by Johnson’s mother and packaged and contained in her slightly chipped china for Johnson to transport on the bus ride down. Sometimes they languished over a turkey-and-stuffing plate piled high sent from Kitt and hand-delivered by Posie’s latest beau. Sometimes they picked at a bowl of chili con carne pilfered from the dining hall hidden under one of Verdi’s oversized textbooks. Sometimes Johnson hopped a bus to Whitaker’s in Southwest Philly and brought back hoagies so substantial that the mayo and onions and cheeses and meats soaked perfectly circled holes through the brown paper bags. But their real appetites transcended even these palatable treasures; it was each other that they hungered for most. Craved. As if they satisfied in each other intense yearnings due to some elemental lacking in themselves.
For Verdi it was the knowledge of things edgy: the marijuana cigarettes Johnson had taught her how to smoke, a trip into West Philly to a card house and speakeasy posing as a dimly lit cellar party just before it was raided; a midnight snack where she and Johnson wolfed down hot buttered yeast rolls at Broadway on Fifty-second Street to quench reefer-induced pangs of famish where Verdi was mesmerized by the late-night mix of laughter and chatter coming from whores and cops and young boys trying to be old in outdated processed hair, and old men trying to be young boys in Afro wigs and gold medallion chains, and middle-aged choir members who’d just left a worship-and-praise service, and the drunks trying to keep some coffee down, and the legitimate club goers just outside Broadway’s window scrambling like carpenter ants before a storm in and out of red-and-blue-aired establishments on the Strip. It was all so thrilling to Verdi as Johnson exposed her to pieces of living she’d never before imagined. She felt herself becoming smarter, sharper, growing angles where she’d typically been round; muscle where she’d been flaccid and soft. She felt leaner and at the same time expansive, fit, as if she were not only working out academically, intellectually with the intense smorgasbord of university requirements, but also being acculturated in the opposite direction, developing that tiny dot of herself that she’d never really nourished that longed to straddle the line between comfort and security, danger and intrigue in the dichotomy of good girl–bad girl, scholar–street-smart. Sometimes she even yearned to cross the line and wade for a minute in the treacherous and forbidden muddied rapids Johnson was introducing her to.
Verdi and Johnson crisscrossed each other in their awakenings to leanings that were opposite their original selves because Johnson was beginning to feel the nudges of transformation as well. He was going to church regularly, having been introduced to a congregation not far from the campus where an old classmate of Verdi’s father was the pastor, and though he complained to Verdi about so-called middle-class Baptists, “They’re extremely Uncle Tomish when it comes to the struggle,” he’d say. “No offense to your father, baby, but those church people have power out to way wide with their economic base, and it’s just not being funneled in any collective and therefore effective way.” Yet, on the Sunday mornings when she might have otherwise overslept because they’d been up half the night playing pinocle with Tower and Cheryl and smoking “the killer,” as they called the really potent weed, and drinking wine and sometimes even graduating to vodka and orange juice, he’d still kiss her awake and put on a borrowed sport jacket over his jeans, and feed her coffee so that she could make the six-block walk to the church, and once there he’d even occasionally clap during the choir’s rendition of a particularly energetic and rousing tune. He actually trod inside of a Bonwit Teller store when Verdi went to buy a birthday gift for shipping down home to her mother—and Bonwit Teller had always symbolized gross opulence to him where the socially negligent would pay three dollars for a cotton handkerchief and scoff at being levied a proportional amount to fund the war on poverty—but he strode through the marble-tiled floors of that place and even stuck his Afro pick in his jeans pocket instead of as an ornament growing out of the center of his hair; he kissed her behind the ear when he did, whispered, “This is only for you, baby, might keep the security guards in their three-piece suits—as if I don’t know they’re rent-a-cops—from walking on our heels while you try to shop for your moms.” He experienced theater for the first time with Verdi under his arm. Sat through the Philadelphia Orchestra on tickets sent by Verdi’s piano teacher from back home and never admitted to Tower and Moose and the rest how the violin concerto stirred something someplace so deeply planted under his layers and layers of city-street-poor, revolution-now affect that it frightened him at first. Desisted admitting to any kind of transformation when his dorm mates challenged him over spit-tinged marijuana cigarettes. “You getting so establishment we got bets on how long before you strut through here in a Brooks Brothers pinstripe and leather-soled oxfords,” they teased.
Where Verdi would openly express the thrill of all that she was experiencing; she would beam and laugh and hop excitedly and beg, “Oh please, Johnson, let’s go off campus and cop some really good weed and then trip off of the drunks on Fortieth Street,” Johnson could not. Felt that indication of any acquiescence on his part meant that he was selling out.
“I’m nobody’s Tom,” he’d remind Verdi even as he accompanied her to tea at the Mount Airy home of the descendant of the founder of the social club that at her mother’s insistence had been a part of her growing-up years. Had to pretend that his entry into Verdi’s world was solely for her, that it was even painful for him to take certain steps. Would maintain to his boys as they guzzled cheap wine and told pussy-chasing stories that he was forced to accompany his lady to the Nutcracker suite or else she’d hold out on him at night, then he’d go on to chronicle how Verdi would let him curl up in her tiny dorm bed all next to her and as soon as his manhood went hard as granite and swelled and throbbed she’d remind him how he’d refused to participate in what he called some wannabe activity and then she’d close up tighter than a clam protecting a gleaming oversized pearl. “Do you know how that shit feels,” he’d say, “like hey, man, just put me on ice in a freezer someplace so I’ll go numb because that laying up hard all night next to a warm soft body is some painful shit.”
He’d get their concurrence then, their sympathy, though of course he lied. Verdi was perpetually hot and brimming, it seemed, just oozing sexuality once they got to her room and locked the door and dimmed the lights and got some Stylistics going on the record player. Lately she had even started making the first moves, showing her nakedness unabashedly, jostling to be on top, wanting to try things, always always wanting to try something new. He sometimes thought that it was a good thing that she was so straitlaced, that she might otherwise suffer from nymphomania if not for those cultural and religious controls that were so glued to her sense of who, what she was. So he was more than grateful for that shy and blushing churchy side to her because it kept him from worrying about some other brother tapping on her door when he wasn’t around—especially since she didn’t have a roommate and the brothers always went after the ones with the single rooms. All he’d have to do was remember her manners, her politeness, her ability to say something like, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” as quickly as he was prone to take the Lord’s name in vain and the thought would relax him, confirm in his mind that Verdi wasn’t some temptress just passing the time with him until the next pair of pants came through, that it wasn’t just a nonspecific maleness that she responded to when they were together and she turned to cream, it was him, Johnson, who aroused her, who she adored. She was his lady, his African-American queen, and he’d topple mountains to keep her so.
Except that he couldn’t topple the mountain of his sadness that had slithered through him so quietly without even calling attention to itself, until it was so deep on the inside that he couldn’t even tell from where it emanated, couldn’t single out an event, or remark, or thought, or memory—no cause, it seemed, to the depression that would start with a pounding fist from the inside of his chest and then billow until even the air that surrounded him accumulated itself into a bleakness that he could barely see through. It was worse during the summer. And this summer of ’72 was the worst of all because Verdi wasn’t here to give him relief.
Though she’d pleaded to be allowed to stay in Philly just as she did every break, her parents said no. Her father had secured her a paid summer position in Maynard Jackson’s campaign for mayor, so staying in Philly this summer wasn’t negotiable, not at all. And even though she’d managed to finagle two weekends back in June, and one in July, the stretches without her, without being able to draw on her infectious good spirit, her intact benevolent philosophy that believed that through it all everything would work out fine, made Johnson feel the way he imagined a broken-down racehorse must feel just before it was shot.
And it wasn’t just the missing Verdi. It was all of his school activities that had kept him occupied so that his sadness had to be thunderous before it captured his attention. He’d worked incessantly on a committee to plan a black dorm on campus, and now that was going to happen; he’d studied hard otherwise, though he’d missed the dean’s list because of a C in a lit course, Romantic Poets, not even part of his major architecture concentration, blamed the grade on the racist professor who told Johnson that although his paper comparing Wordsworth and Coleridge was brilliant, he’d misplaced semicolons, that he’d never make it through an institution such as the university if he didn’t master the use of semicolons. But even fighting the racism when he was on campus involved a certain directed energy that he didn’t have to draw on at home. Had to draw on only enough to make it to his assembly line–like summer job at UPS, and stop by Bug’s third-floor apartment on the way home because at least that way his mother would already be asleep when he stumbled in and he wouldn’t have to torture himself trying to think of something to say to drain the heaviness from her sighs.
And Bug’s orange vinyl couch brought Johnson relief this summer. Bug’s stories about his brother mixed with the marijuana and the wine, even filled a corner of the hole Verdi’s absence left. And when Johnson confided to Bug that he missed his old lady, Bug laughed, said my young blood I got just the thing to cure a lonely heart and turned him on to a little speed in orange juice. And by July he was also popping Quaaludes to counteract the hyperness brought on by the speed, and then he was smoking opium to smooth it all out, and he was on the countdown to when school would start, when he’d have Verdi’s head against his chest again, and it was within ten days, the middle of August now, and by now Bug’s orange vinyl couch had the print of Johnson’s substance etched into its cracks. And Bug asked Johnson if he was ready to taste heaven.
“Taste heaven?”
“No shit, man. I swear to you man, but you got to be prepared because it’s some powerful shit, man. Better than pussy, man. I wouldn’t lay this shit on just anybody, but you my young blood, man.”
And Johnson said that he wasn’t about getting strung out.
“One time don’t string nobody out, Johnson, man. But hey, it’s cool. It was gonna be turn-on but I ain’t got to beg nobody to turn them the fuck on.”
And Johnson’s defenses were already down, the wine, the reefer, his sadness snaking him the way that it was, and ten entire days before he’d see his Verdi Mae. “Bring it on, man,” he said, “let’s see what the fuck you talking about. Bring it on.”
“You sure, man?” Bug said even as he cooked it in a Vaseline lid on the coffee table. “This shit is without sin that’s how pure it is. Get ready to see Jesus,” he said as he showed him where to tighten the belt, and the vein they were going to hit: the thickest vein, that showed on the underside of his arm and shimmered with sweat and pulsed like a sex-starved woman. “That one, we gonna hit that one,” Bug whispered, and he pumped it into Johnson’s arm, and Johnson didn’t even feel Bug pull it out because a pipe organ started issuing forth its vibrations from the center of his chest and sending its smooth tones to his head bursting note by note and melting, coating his brain with liquid music that was thick and sweet as sap. And he started to sing along with the organs. And now he knew how it felt to be transformed into a note and given pitch through the air and soar and dip, freely, uncaged, no longer internally bound. This night he sang all night long and nodded as spit dripped from the side of his mouth. And even in this liquid condition he knew that he would have to feel this pipe organ again. Damn.
Remarkably Johnson kept the heroin part hidden at first by just staying away from people who mattered; he was only partaking once a month anyhow, light doses, and after each one, when the rush was over and the liquid music dried, leaving only its irritating thickness, he swore to himself that he wouldn’t do it again. That the posthigh lethargy was too momentous a price for him to pay with all that he was trying to accomplish. School, Verdi, the BSL, the good-paying part-time job at United Parcel. Except that at least while the pipe organ was vibrating, he wasn’t sad. It was the absence of sadness that he sought when time and again he’d return to the orange vinyl couch at Bug’s. Once a month on Thursdays, his payday—though this rippled progression from one substance to the next had started off as turn-ons, freebies, gifts from Bug, now Bug would often proclaim, “My young blood, if it were up to me I wouldn’t charge you a dime, but you understand I have suppliers to pay, though I swear whatever you want will always be at a price not a penny higher than my cost to procure it.”
But with this regular, monthly use came a certain boldness, that he could do it and nobody would know, and surprisingly, nobody did notice at first; more surprising, at least to Johnson was who noticed first.
Posie was between men this Saturday evening and spending more time outside of her bedroom where she could think clearly. She couldn’t think at all in her bedroom. Her bedroom was designed for feeling over thought with its perfumed air, and lacy antique curtains, and softly textured and flowered wallpaper; her night tables were skirted, her pillows covered with satin cases, her bedspread such a hot, bold pink that it bordered on red. But the kitchen where she was right now was a mild yellow, Kitt’s favorite color, and expansive and cozy at the same time, organized, functional, no excesses like the boudoir vases, and lamps, swatches of silk here, velvet there that permeated Posie’s bedroom and ensured that any brain activity was merely as the conduit to explode impulses to other body parts. Posie was thinking about how she really needed to spend more time outside of her bedroom, that she probably wouldn’t have been with half of the men she’d been with if she’d picked and chosen surrounded by the kitchen’s mild yellow thought-provoking walls. Right now Kitt stirred around in a pot on the stove, and Johnson had his face in a book, and Posie’s thinking was so clear that she could feel the crisp, smacking sound of her thoughts as if they were being shuffled around like a deck of new cards. No man was coming to call this Friday evening so no need to pull away from the settling sounds of the kitchen to bathe and oil and dust herself down and sweeten her crevices and swathe herself in her silky lounging robe that fell open to her waist when she sat in her pink velvet chair just so. No need to light an Essence of Nature candle and inhale deeply so that the oil on her skin would mix with her own womanhood rising out through her pores and have him—whoever was the object of her infatuation at the moment—begging to do anything, whatever she wanted, just let him be against the feel of her skin. Instead tonight she inhaled the steam rising out of the pot of chicken and dumplings Kitt was stirring, and something about that aroma hitting her nose brought out her maternal side as she picked at the ends of Johnson’s dense Afro and told him that his ends needed a clipping, that his bush would turn shaggy and unkempt looking if he didn’t take special care of his ends.
And Kitt agreed and commenced with a description of the worst ’fro she had seen yet. “It was all matted and so filled with lint that I swore a whole family of rats could have been living in that hair, so I stood up the whole bus ride home rather than sit next to that man.”
Posie laughed and fingered Johnson’s hair and enjoyed the card game going on in her head that was unencumbered by her bodily sensations.
That’s when her thoughts moved beyond Johnson’s hair to his hands. His hands were still. They were rarely still. He was always tapping them or patting them or strumming them, always palpating something, fidgeting in ways that she thought so charming and little-boy-like. But he wasn’t fidgeting now, hadn’t been lately now that she thought about it. Lately he’d been dragging, even talking slowly when usually his words splashed out like typhoons. Big intelligent words especially if he was preaching to Kitt and her on the unseen ways that black people were exploited; many Posie hadn’t even given thought to. But he wasn’t talking as Posie squinted over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of the title of the book he was reading. The Underside of American History. She repeated the title out loud. “That sounds interesting, Johnson,” she said as she walked around to the other side of the table to look on Johnson’s face.
He sat there smiling slowly even as Posie prayed for the typhoon, for his words to gush out and indict the white man and his history. Anything to show some pointed understanding. But Posie saw that his face wasn’t showing any real comprehension of the words on the page, that he seemed ready to fall asleep in the middle of his smile. And now he yawned, took what felt like to Posie a full minute to stretch his mouth to an oversized O, and just as long to fix it back to a line that sagged at the corners. Posie felt her heart drop. “I said that book you’re reading sounds interesting, Johnson.” Her voice was loud and insistent and Kitt turned around from the stove to see why her mother was speaking in such a tone.
“It is, Posie. Very interesting,” Johnson said, his head still in the book.
He started laughing then, and if Posie’s heart dropped just a minute ago, now it froze. She knew only one thing that would have an otherwise hyper person like Johnson laughing like he was laughing now, a slow series of low erratic cracks coming from his throat that sounded to Posie more like a death rattle than a laugh. It was true. She hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself how off of his rhythm he’d been. And just at that second of insight when the airiness of her feelings might have transformed itself into a concrete thought, she’d get distracted, pulled to her bedroom by her latest beau so that her thoughts went amorphous on her. And then Johnson would show up a few days later with his movable nature intact, talking in gushes again, following Kitt and Posie’s every word.
“Johnson,” Posie said, in that voice of hers that was high and flat and belied the seriousness plastered on her face. “Do you feel all right, I mean you seem not altogether with it, if you know what I mean.”
Johnson closed his book and let it fall against the table. He looked at Posie then and tried to smile, but what felt like syrup was caked to the sides of his mouth and was impeding his smile, so he scratched at the corners of his mouth and then scratched his neck, his eyes closed now, and then he realized he was scratching all over and sat up with a jolt.
Posie’s expression had gone from serious to horrified as she watched him scratching like a common street junkie. Why? With all he had going for him, why? Why would he flush it down the toilet like this? She almost asked him, almost demanded that he explain the why to her. But she couldn’t form the words against her tongue even as she groped with her hands to try to help the words along and ended up doing with her hands what she couldn’t with her mouth. She slapped Johnson with the back of her hand soundly across his dumbstruck face.
“Mama,” Kitt blurted as she turned around this time to the sound of skin against skin and saw Johnson grabbing his face, blood dripping between his fingers from where Posie’s cocktail ring had ripped across his cheek. “What did you do to him? What’s wrong with you?” She walked toward Posie, the wooden ladle in her hand dripping a cloudy-colored liquid on the floor that smelled of dough and onions. “Mama, are you going crazy or something, look at what you did to his face.”
Kitt ran to the sink and exchanged her wooden ladle for a wet paper towel and in a flash was dabbing Johnson’s cheek all the while asking, demanding an explanation from her mother, even as Johnson told Kitt that it was okay, he was fine, just fine. “Just leave it alone, Kitt,” he begged, “I’m fine, just fine.”
But Kitt wouldn’t leave it alone, couldn’t as she stood eye to eye to Posie and was struck by the righteous defiance in Posie’s eyes. In Kitt’s mind there was only one thing that would make a woman slap a man, draw blood the way Posie just had, and then stand back looking justified and vindicated. The man would have had to have just squeezed her butt, or pinched her breast, wet her ear with his tongue, slid his finger in her crotch, rubbed his manhood against her thigh. Kitt couldn’t even fathom that Posie had just slapped Johnson as a mother would a son, because she rarely saw Posie as a mother in a terrycloth robe and mismatched wool socks, or cotton duster, or pinafore apron making chicken and dumplings. No. Kitt was the one who made chicken and dumplings while Posie sauntered in and out of the kitchen whenever she felt like it wreaking her womanhood like a whore wearing too much perfume. And since at this moment she couldn’t see Posie’s maternal side, she totally misread the scene and didn’t even notice Johnson trip over nothing but his own feet as he pushed himself to standing, or the lagging to his words when he mumbled out that he didn’t mean to cause any confusion, that he would just leave, he was fine, just fine.
“Don’t leave, Johnson,” Kitt said, even as she continued to stare Posie down. “Mama owes you an apology because she’s sorely mistaken about whatever it is that she thinks just caused her to hit you like that.”
“Well, what do you think I think it is?” Posie matched Kitt’s tough-girl stance with her own but the hand-on-hip, finger-pointing, I’ll-kick-your-ass-right-now demeanor was too unnatural for Posie to maintain and she settled for her arms clasped tightly across her chest.
Kitt shook Johnson’s shoulder. “Tell her she must be losing her mind,” she said, her voice screeching with all the emotion of someone who’s positive that they’re right even before hearing the facts and feeling so certain without the facts reinforces that the sense of rightness must be coming from some intuitive place and therefore couldn’t be in error.
Johnson felt as if he wanted to piss and shit at the same time not knowing what to make of whatever was happening between Kitt and Posie. Even in his diminished state with the fog over his head that always hung around a day or two after he’d emptied the white powdered-filled bag into his arm, he could tell that the argument between them was serious, much more serious than the backhanded slap he’d just taken from Posie. “Please, Posie, Kitt, don’t fight on my behalf,” he said to the confused kitchen air as he started walking toward the archway of the kitchen door. He let out that death-rattle laugh again. “I just need to get some sleep at night. Whew.” He tripped again on nothing but the floor as he continued to walk.
It was too late to ask Kitt and Posie not to argue. Their voices were raised against each other as Kitt told Posie that she was just so self-possessed that she thought every man wanted to come on to her. “Well, you’re wrong, wrong, Mother, if you think Johnson wants you, you old woman you.”
That stopped Posie. She was just beginning to think that maybe Kitt knew what Johnson was doing, that she was covering up for him and that’s why the vigorous defense. Or that maybe Kitt cared so much for Johnson that she was choosing to keep her eyes pressed shut to what he was doing. She was all set to bombard Kitt with the evidence, wear her down with her mother-knows-best offense. But these words that had just left Kitt’s mouth and slammed into her with all the force of a Mack truck were not daughter-to-mother. They were woman-to-woman. They were more like words that would have come from her sister’s mouth, that had come from her sister’s mouth once. How much Kitt looked like her sister now, beautiful and self-righteously defiant and wrong. Posie was without offense, without words, without even breath as she felt herself going into a wheeze. She needed to get out of the kitchen, needed to get to her bedroom and take her medicine, needed to go for a walk in the chilly air and clear her head.
Kitt knew that she’d leaped wildly in the wrong direction when she looked at Posie’s face and watched the question mark in her mother’s eyes yield to a pained understanding of what Kitt was saying. She didn’t know whether to run after her mother, whose silk-paisleyed back was to her now as she walked away shaking her head, or Johnson, who had just closed the front door behind him. She opted for Johnson, called out his name as she ran through the living room to the enclosed porch just in time to see him leaned over, vomiting on the pavement in front of her just-swept door.