Should he shave? Sam, locked in the bathroom he shared with his brothers, ran two fingers along his jawline and over his upper lip, but instead of sandpaper it felt more like blades of newly sprouted grass. “I celebrate myself and sing myself—and what I assume you shall assume . . .” No, that was leaves, not blades, of grass and to judge by his photo Walt Whitman had never shaved in his life. What did it matter? Supposedly, girls loved poetry, and Sam, halfway through his senior year of high school, was finally tall enough to stand next to one and recite Whitman or whatever to her face instead of into her boobs. For the first time in his life, Sam was starting to get some second female looks, as in “Is that really Sam? Scrawny little Sammy Stein?” Scrawny no more, Sam had shot up half a foot since the start of the school year, rocketing in three months from puny to lean to—dare one say—lanky?
“Yes, one would definitely dare,” Sam told his reflection.
But he still hadn’t kissed a girl. At seventeen!
Well, it was a new year—new decade—or almost. Seven hours to go and 1969 would morph into 1970, senior spring would officially begin, and Samuel Orin Stein would be free to do whatever the hell he liked with whoever the hell he wanted to do it. His college applications were in, his second round with the SATs was coming up in six weeks, AP English and history were ticking along nicely. As long as he didn’t flunk anything or get arrested, he was golden.
All he needed was a girlfriend.
Sam turned on the water, washed his face, brushed his teeth, combed his wavy chin-length reddish brown hair, scanned the dense drifts of nose and forehead freckles for the telltale bomb crater of a zit. He got so close to the mirror that their noses almost touched. Cute as you turned out? Girls will eat you alive. Tutu told him that just last week—and when it came to appearances, Tutu never lied. What would a girl see? Sly hazel eyes flecked with gold and green. Mouth too big for the concave cheeks. Pale, barely visible eyebrows. Tufts of orange fuzz. And freckles—millions of amber dots that swirled and merged and overlapped in coded patterns.
I love freckles, she—whoever she was—would say.
“Would you like to try one?” he asked the mirror coyly.
Sam braced for the reprimand. Tutu was always on his case for talking to himself in the bathroom, though he never understood how she could pick up his solo mumbling clear across the house. But when he shut off the faucet what he heard was not her raucous imperative but a high thin whine like a dentist’s drill. Crying? He opened the bathroom door, flipped on the overhead light in the hall—he’d been in there communing with his cuteness so long that night had fallen—and followed the keening to the kitchen.
“Tutu?”
The room blazed with light. Tonight was his parents’ big New Year’s Eve dinner party and every surface was mounded with food, bowls, boxes, bottles, jars, utensils. A cast-iron skillet of Crisco sputtered on the stove, but instead of frying, Tutu was collapsed on the patched vinyl bench with the apron pressed to her face. Her knobby shoulders shuddered as she rocked back and forth.
Crying—her? Sam had only seen tears in Tutu’s eyes three times in his life: the Sunday in September 1963 when four little black girls got blown up in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. The day JFK was assassinated. And when the news came over her radio that Dr. King had been shot. Otherwise she was as impervious as a cop.
“What happened? Are you hurt? Did someone die?”
“Oh, Sammy.” She rocked and howled and the words strangled in her throat. “They’ve gone and fired me, Sammy.”
“Who did?”
The wailing screeched to a stop like a needle skidding across a record. “Who do you think—Mickey Mouse?” Tutu hated a dumb question. “Your parents, that’s who. They told me I’m too old and sick to work anymore. One month and I’m out.”
Sam slumped down on the bench across from her and listened with head bowed while she gasped out the story. The week before Christmas, Tutu had nearly passed out after climbing the steep flight of stairs to her attic room. Sam’s mother, Penny, a radiologist at the local hospital, insisted she be checked out by a heart specialist. Tutu backed out of the first three appointments, but when she finally submitted, the exam revealed that the valves of her heart were seriously damaged, probably from a childhood bout of rheumatic fever. Climbing steps, hauling laundry, dragging around the vacuum—really anything that elevated the pulse could kill her. The cardiologist had advised Penny to let Tutu go—for her own good—and the Steins chose New Year’s Eve to break the news. “Out to pasture, Sammy.” The tears were running down her face again. “Don’t they see I got bills to pay—money I owe—people who depend on me? How am I supposed to get another job? Who’d hire me at my age? Next thing I’ll be pushing up the daisies in potter’s field.”
“Wait a minute! They can’t just get rid of you like that. You’re part of the family!”
They locked eyes, Tutu’s brown pools rimmed in red and Sam’s hazel cat’s eyes snapping with outrage. “Family, huh?” She took a pinch of bare ginger-colored skin from under the white cuff of her uniform and twisted it at him. “Does it look like we’re related?” She heaved herself to her feet. “Now get out my kitchen, boy.” That’s what she always called it—my kitchen—though not one thing in that linoleum, chrome, Formica, plastic, and knotty pine room belonged to her. “I got work to do.”
“But—”
“No buts. I’m not your auntie. I’m nothing but the maid. Ex-maid soon enough.”
“what do you mean her own good? That’s so”—Sam mentally riffled through his newly acquired SAT words—“paternalistic. Don’t you think Tutu can take care of herself? Make her own decisions?”
Sam had been tracking his mother through the house ever since she got back from her final round of party errands, and now the two of them faced off in the dank cinder-block basement outside the liquor closet. The naked 45-watt bulb trapped them in a cone of dirty light. Penny Stein, her back to the locked plywood door, had the key to the kingdom of booze hidden in her fist. “So what’s your solution, Sam?” Thanks to the recent growth spurt, he was now tall enough to look down on the straight sharp part in the black helmet of his mother’s hair. “You wanna do the housework she can’t handle anymore? Or watch her keel over of a heart attack while she’s schlepping your dirty undies?”
“How about letting her decide? Give her the autonomy.” Those SAT words were great in arguments.
“How about you mind your own business.”
“How is this not my business? Tutu practically raised me.”
“Oh for god’s sake.”
“And if she’s so sick, how come she’s working on New Year’s Eve? Fried chicken and corn bread! What’s your theme this year—down on the plantation?” His mother bristled. “Don’t you think it’s just a tad hypocritical having the black maid serve soul food to your rich white friends? I mean, this is 1969. Have you ever heard of Black Power?”
“Tutu doesn’t need Black Power,” Penny shot back. “She’s got us. She’s one of the family.”
“Right. That’s why you’re firing her. I’ll keep that in mind when you get old and—”
“We’re not firing—she’s retiring!” Sam could tell he’d pushed her to the edge. “She’s sixty-six years old. She’s got her own place in Harlem. Her brother and sister are there. She’ll be grateful.”
“She sure didn’t seem grateful when I found her crying her eyes out in the kitchen.”
“You’re going to college next fall, remember, Sammy? You’re raised.”
“That’s a cop-out and you know it.” He willed himself not to mist up. “Go ahead—open it.” He flicked his eyes toward the liquor closet lock. “I’m outta here anyway, so your liquid treasures are safe.”
And with that, Sam clattered up the basement steps, grabbed his coat from the hall closet, and stormed out into the night—the last night of 1969.
Then he stormed back in just long enough to pop his head into the kitchen to say goodbye to Tutu. He stopped dead at the threshold. It was like he’d been electrocuted. Time ceased as Sam got sucked into one of those vortices where the ocean sizzles in your ears and your head floats free and you’re convinced you’ve lived this moment before. He stared, glassy-eyed, and instead of his flinty old housekeeper, there was this strange rangy lady with a gash in her heart and a hole in her pocket standing at the stove singing a song he had never heard but knew anyway—the darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide. Sam blinked and the vision cleared. “Happy new year, Tutu! Peace!” he shouted over the hiss of fat and gospel and he was gone again.