Did you meet someone?”
It was ten and a half hours into the new decade and Sam had just staggered into the kitchen, head pounding, heart gushing, lips chafed from the longest first kiss in history. He could still taste Kim’s perfume on the tip of his tongue. Not just flowers—lilies of the valley, she told him. Kim, short for Kimberly, Goodman. There was her phone number inked on his palm and miraculously intact. He hadn’t invented it.
“Smart to get her number. Does this little honey have a name?”
No way was he going to spill the beans to Tutu. Not one word. If she got wind of the fact that Richard was the one who introduced him to Kim, he’d never hear the end of it.
“Well, you better get in there. They’re waiting on you.”
The New Year’s Day brunch was a Stein family tradition. No matter how hungover, every Stein had to show up that morning for scrambled eggs, bacon, and waffles—a rare treat that only Tutu knew how to coax from the jaws of the rickety sticky waffle iron. The Steins being Jewish didn’t do Christmas. The boys were banned from the annual New Year’s Eve bash. But the Day After brunch was a command performance.
When Sam took his seat at the table, the parents as usual were talking about their work partners (the managers who wrangled endlessly at his father’s toy business and the male radiology team that lorded it over the two female attendings at his mother’s hospital). Then his mother changed the subject to “lovely girls,” her euphemism for the ugly daughters of friends and distant relatives she was forever trying to palm off on Ron and Tom—Sam too, now that he’d had his growth spurt. He thought about bringing up Tutu’s situation, maybe trying to enlist his brothers—but the deep trenches furrowing his father’s face decided him against it. They had no choice, Kim had said proudly when he marveled that her family let her go down south with Delores. The way to win with parents, according to Kim, was not to confront but to box them into a corner. Divide and conquer. Manipulate. Bore from within. He blinked and there she was behind his eyes. Had she been teasing when she said he was adorable? But if she didn’t like him just a little, why did she let him kiss her?
“Not hungry?” Tutu asked when she came in to clear the table. “Cat got your tongue?”
Sam just shook his head and carried his plate into the kitchen. In a way, Tutu was his best friend and had always been. She knew his habits and moods and secrets better than his own mother did. She could read his mind. She had his back whatever trouble he made or got into. But after last night, something was different. He couldn’t bear the sight of her in a uniform. I’m not your damn maid was her joke but it wasn’t funny. If Tutu wasn’t their maid, what was she? “Quit poking your nose where it doesn’t belong,” she was always warning him. But hadn’t Kim poked into her maid’s business?
He knew he should wait before calling. Being desperate was the epitome of uncool—but he was desperate.
She picked up on the first ring. “I was hoping it was you. How’s your mouth? Mine’s still completely numb—I can barely eat.”
“Sorry . . . I should’ve . . .”
But Kim burst out laughing—“It was soooooo romantic once I found the ChapStick”—and Sam knew that everything was going to be all right.
They spoke for an hour, until she had to hang up and pee, and then for another hour until she said that her ear was now as sore as her lips. “You’re killing me, Samuel Stein.” But she agreed they had to see each other again. Soon. As in that afternoon. She lived three miles away and the streets were slushy from the couple of inches of snow that had fallen the night before. Minor obstacle. Sam put on his galoshes and ducked out before Tutu cornered him. His English class was reading The Sun Also Rises and as he headed down the driveway, he pretended it was Paris. Kim and Lady Brett fused in his mind. “Hullo, chaps—how about a drink?” The cobblestone streets were etched in black and silver. The women all wore long scarves and crimson lipstick. He and Kim/Brett found a little round marble-top table in the corner of their café and ordered Pernod—whatever that was—and devoured each other with their eyes until they were so famished for love they had to flee down the avenue and race the five flights up to her flat under the eaves, and with the Eiffel Tower winking through the window, they . . .
“Down, boy,” Sam said aloud. And then, “Quit talking to yourself, you idiot.” But who would hear? The street was deserted, as usual, and so was the next street and the next and the one after that. Nothing but scoops of frosted shrubs; green stubble poking through the snow; black tracks scoring the white streets. What a godawful place they made him live in. What a godawful family. Did they have any idea how smug they were? They all cried when Dr. King was shot but did anything change? They didn’t even ask Tutu how she felt. “She doesn’t want to talk about it,” his mother insisted. But did that mean she didn’t care? For years now, every time something about civil rights came on the radio, Tutu switched it off. Maybe she didn’t want them to see how upset she was. Maybe she listened alone in her attic bedroom, where she could shake her fist in freedom. Maybe it reminded her of how much she hated being a maid. A live-in. Upstairs was her domain. It was all she had—until they kicked her out.
Sam remembered the few times he’d ventured up to the refinished attic room where Tutu slept five nights a week. Even though it was just a staircase away from the rest of the house, the upper floor felt old and worn and mysterious, as if the suffering past were entombed under the eaves. Gaudy floral paper covered the walls; the trim was painted institutional aquamarine; low-wattage bulbs filtered through cloudy glass shades barely lit the corners of the brown linoleum floor. Fifteen steps took him there, but it was like crossing into a foreign country. He was careful to knock and wait for her permission. When he opened the door, Tutu would be sitting there smiling with the Bible resting in her palms. Happy to see him—happier than she ever was downstairs. Sam liked it up there. He liked being a stranger in his own house, a guest. Tutu’s guest. A picture of Jesus crowned with thorns hung by the door and the Lord’s Prayer in gothic print was tacked over her bed. “One day, I’m going to take you to my church,” she told him. “Show you off to my friends.” But that day had never come because Sam’s mother was too scared to let him to go to Harlem.
And now he’d never get to go.
The bubble burst and Sam realized he was lost. Kim said she lived on Red Oak Lane, just south of the train station—it sounded simple over the phone, but he’d never been to this part of town and everything looked strange in the flat aqueous half-light. He trudged on through the slush, dreaming himself back to their café. Afterward. Kim was reaching for his hands across the tabletop. Sam was wedging a knee between her legs. She had the most beautiful neck—reed thin, petal soft, the skin almost translucent.
“You know I have a boyfriend.”
Kim dropped this on him last night but Sam had conveniently forgotten until now. Or did she say had? He was suddenly miserable. The guy’s name was Brad, he remembered that much. “Brad’s a total radical—we went to the March on the Pentagon together.” Yeah, and I watched it on TV between Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. What if Brad the Rad was with her now, wooing Kim back with his Che Guevara scruff and killer sneer? “And who’s this little boy? Your latest recruit?” Sam wanted to turn tail and slink back home—but he was freezing so he kept on walking. And there was her house—a bright blue split-level that looked a lot like his. And there was her face in the upstairs window. Beaming at him. Alone. Sam melted and walked up the shoveled path.
making the second move was even harder than the first. For starters, he was sober. Second, Kim now seemed way too beautiful to be touched by the likes of him. Third, they were alone—her parents were at a party, her older sister was away, Delores had the week off—which should have been conducive but wasn’t. They sat on her bed, a platoon of stuffed animals arrayed around them. Sam looked at the books and papers strewn around the patchwork quilt. Soul on Ice. Slaughterhouse-Five. “In Defense of Self Defense” by Huey P. Newton, Black Panthers Minister of Defense. A tabloid newspaper called The Black Panther with the headline free the ny 21 and all political prisoners over a photo of six black men in berets with raised fists.
“My parents think I’ve gone crazy.”
“You’re amazing. This is amazing.”
“And you’re . . .” But she finished the sentence with a kiss.
The only other thing Sam said was “Are you sure?”
The only other thing Kim said was “I’m on the pill.”
She winced when he slipped a hand under her sweater. “Your hands are like ice.” She took his right hand in both of hers and warmed it, moved to the left. Then she freed herself of the sweater and—no bra!—laid both his hands on her boobs. The nipples shrank and hardened in his palms. “There. That’s better.” There was a moment of trembling paralysis. Kim unbuttoned Sam’s shirt. The muscles on his chest were snapping and quivering as if he were being electrocuted—but so gently. A rash of goose bumps spread into his scalp. “You’re shivering,” Kim whispered and embraced him, flesh to flesh. Her fingers undid his pants and fly. “To treat hypothermia you have to be completely naked.” She stripped off jeans and panties and pulled him on top of her. Sam buried his face in the hollow of her neck and inhaled. He brushed her skin with the tip of his lips. Her throat, her jaw, her cheek, her mouth. She spread her legs and he settled between them. “Getting warmer?” Sam groaned. He didn’t know the steps, there was no music—but he was dancing. His fingers wrapped the backs of her thighs. She closed her hand around him and slid him into her. “Slowly,” she murmured. But Sam couldn’t stop.
When it was over, he felt her cheek wet and cold next to his. He thought it was his sweat—right before he came every pore in his body had opened and gushed like a faucet. But it was tears. She was crying.
“Did I? . . . Did you? . . .”
“No, Samuel.” And she circled his back with both arms and pulled him so close that he could feel her heart beating inside his chest. The sweat was chilling him. Her warmth was making him hard again. “It just feels like everything’s over. Everything that ever happened in this room is ending.”
He was back inside. Twice? Sam was thinking. Was that even possible? Every heartbeat made it bigger. The dance he hadn’t known he knew started again. Ending? To him, it felt like everything had just begun.
what to say to the girl who has just relieved you of your virginity? Thanks? Wow? Today I am a man? How was it for you? (How was it for her? he wondered. How could you tell?) Sam was afloat in a tropical sea of relief, an elixir of blissed-out gratitude pumping through his veins—but there was something else gnawing at him he couldn’t name or understand. Apprehension? He had an impulse to call someone and share the news—hand out cigars, stand the guys a round of drinks. But who would he call? And what would he say?
“Good thing you’re on the pill” was what popped out of his mouth. Romantic, hey? They were in her kitchen polishing off a bakery coffee cake. “Tutu warned me not to get my little missy in trouble the first time at bat.”
“That’s what she said? Little missy?” They both snickered.
“Yeah—and she was staring me straight in the crotch when she said it.” Sam grinned. “I thought I would die!” he hollered in Tutu’s accent.
“She sounds funny—funny ha‐ha, not funny peculiar. But Tutu? That can’t be her real name?”
“Nah. Her real name’s Nettie, but I couldn’t say it when I was a baby. So I started calling her Net-tuh and that morphed into Tutu and it stuck. She doesn’t mind.”
“I bet. You ever ask her?”
Sam shook his head. Somehow, it was a relief to talk about Tutu. Trying to conjure her up for Kim, Sam saw how strange she was—funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. Tutu was a sphinx, an oracle, a fount of arcane knowledge and allusions. She told Sam when he was little that if he kept sucking his thumb his teeth would grow up his nose like tusks. Don’t eat hot eggs, it will make your breath bad. If a pregnant woman touches a toad, her baby will have warts. When Sam and his brothers got out of hand, rather than spank (strictly forbidden) or fly off the handle, Tutu shook her head and murmured under her breath, “If he’s not just like that certain party I know.” No matter how they begged, she never revealed the identity of this mysterious stranger (it was years before Sam even realized she was talking about a person and not some sort of birthday bash with a clown and twisted balloons). “I used to think that certain party was some two-bit hoodlum slouched in a dark alley,” he told Kim. “You know—with smoke curling up his pencil mustache, a switchblade in his pants pocket, dandruff salting his greasy scalp. Then I saw To Kill a Mockingbird and I thought maybe Boo Radley was that certain party.”
Kim stared. “It never occurred to you that she made that certain party up just to torture you?”
Never, Sam was thinking—but he didn’t want to look like the gullible idiot he was, so he kept talking. “She also had a secret hiding place. That had to be real.” Whenever he and his brothers fought over a toy, Tutu used to snatch it and stow it away in her secret hiding place and there it would stay until they deserved to get it back. No toy ever returned from sequestration. On her days off, Sam and his brothers combed through every inch of the house and basement searching for their vanished Magic 8 Balls and Mr. Potato Heads. They did everything but pry up the floorboards but the secret eluded them. “And now they’re firing her,” he sighed.
“What?”
“For her own good, they claim—on account of her bad heart.”
“And you’re letting them?” Sam flinched. She made it sound like it was his fault. Something snapped—the mood broke. Kim, suddenly all business, was reeling off facts and figures. Did he have any idea how little blacks earned compared to whites? After twenty-five years at the same job, a white worker had savings, security, pension. Tutu had none of that, right? Because she was a black woman. Couldn’t his parents see how unfair that was? It was different with her maid, Delores—Kim had seen to that. Delores had worked for the Goodman family for years, but she was scared they’d fire her if she made any demands, so Kim stepped up to advocate for her. Delores hated the horrible uniform they made her wear, and Kim badgered her parents to let her wear own clothes to work. When she told Kim she wanted to eat with the rest of family instead of sitting hunched alone in the kitchen, Kim went on a hunger strike until her parents caved. Delores had paid vacations—including Christmas and New Year’s. She wasn’t docked for the time she took off to deal with family emergencies. Common human decency, but none of it had ever occurred to Kim’s parents. “Civil rights was not enough,” she wound up. “It’s on us, Sam. We have to do something.” Her voice stung him. “Blacks were slaves here for two hundred years—twice as long as they’ve been free.” In a flash she was on her feet—“Wait a sec!”—up the stairs and back with her copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The book fell open to the marked page. “Listen to this.”
In one generation, the black slave women in America had been raped by the slavemaster white man until there had begun to emerge a homemade, handmade, brainwashed race that was no longer even of its true color, that no longer even knew its true family names. The slavemaster forced his family name upon this rape-mixed race, which the slavemaster began to call “the Negro.”
Kim closed the book and stared at him. “What’s Tutu’s last name?”
“Carter.”
“Slave name. Same as Curry. Delores Curry. She told me that half the rednecks in her home county are named Curry. Someday I’m gonna help Delores find her real family—her African family. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”
That would be amazing, Sam agreed, but already his mind was drifting back to what had just happened in her bed. He would never be a virgin again. Forever. And ever. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The two of them would fix the world together—later.
As Kim flipped through Malcolm X, Sam kept the jubilation to himself. Were they now officially a couple? He decided not to ask or even wonder. Let it be.