Samuel Orin Stein’s diary.
Private property!
If you are reading this, stop now, close the cover and put it back in the drawer.
Yes, YOU.
MONDAY, JANUARY 5
After everything that’s happened, I can’t believe I had to go back to school. Attendance. Pledge of Allegiance. Social studies. Rancid gym locker. Coach Dykstra’s pizza face. Newspaper staff meeting. I am not the same person—but no one seems to have noticed, not even Dirty Face. “Kimberly Goodman—she sounds like a Puritan” was all he said when I told him about us. US. “I promise you Kim is no Puritan,” I said, to which he replied, “Please, Sammy, spare me the details.” Good old Dirty Face. So I’m going to have to celebrate myself and sing myself by myself.
Headline: Sam Stein Falls in Love. Deck: Aftermath of a Drug-Fueled New Year’s Eve Party. Lede: Jan. 1, Fat Neck, NY. At 3 p.m. this afternoon, an extraordinary event took place [“transpired” better? occurred, unfolded, came to pass, got imprinted on the sheets?] in an upstairs bedroom at 3 Red Oak Lane. Seventeen-year-old Samuel Orin Stein, a senior at Fat Neck North Senior High School, lost his virginity.
Sammy Boy, you are sooooooooo immature. I mean, why don’t you brag about how many times you did it? But oh god oh god oh god I still can’t believe this is happening. And with Kim Goodman—the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen anywhere.
Kimberly (“my parents named me for a toilet paper company because it didn’t sound Jewish”) Goodman. Kim. Not Kimmy—never Kimmy. Kimberly Beth Goodman.
And to think we’ve known each other for less than a week.
Why me?
Why not me?
But why did she cry? Did I hurt her? She was not a virgin—she made that pretty obvious. I wonder how many others there have been, aside from Brad the Rad? Was I as good as him? At least you forbore to ask her. Never ask. Sammy Stein, it’s about time you learned to keep your big mouth shut (and what a cute mouth it is according to Kim—hold on a sec—I gotta go check it out in the mirror and see what she’s talking about).
Okay I’m back. Everything looks just as goofy as ever but as long as Kim thinks I’m cute who cares about the stick-out ears and the ridiculous orange peach fuzz?
JANUARY 12, 10 PM
One week later—but what a week!
Where to begin?
If not now, when?
I know I’m lucky—lucky but insane!
I haven’t seen Kim in three days and I’m going crazy. I just called but there was no answer. Where is she? There’s so much I need to tell her.
To start with, all the stuff about my time at Tutu’s place.
And all the stuff I want to tell her but can’t because Tutu would kill me. Where to begin—where to end????
What’s truly weird is how Kim and Tutu have gotten so tangled up together. Actually not that weird considering how obsessed Kim is with the souls of black folk. It’s like every other word out of her mouth is black—black power, black panther, black pride, black history. Naturally, it was Kim’s idea that I go to Harlem with Tutu.
Yes, I spent the weekend in Harlem and lo! I’m here to tell the tale.
So here’s the tale.
When I told Kim about how Tutu has her own apartment for her days off and how she used to ask my mother if she could take me there, she jumped. “You gotta do it, Samuel.” (She calls me Samuel which no one has done since nursery school—“Wait your turn, Samuel”—but it sounds so sexy and mysterious when she says it.) Her: “Don’t ask permission—just tell them you’re going.” Me: “But I thought we were going to spend the weekend together?” Her: “We’ll have a million weekends. This is more important.” Me (but silently): “Nothing is more important.” But I knew it would make her happy—and I was curious—so I took the plunge. Starship Parenterprise seemed dubious, but I played on their guilt—“Her time’s running out, you said so yourself”—and finally they said okay.
When I ran the plan by Tutu on Saturday morning, she seemed kind of taken aback at first—“You mean tonight?”—but then she got on the phone and I heard her yelling and screaming at whoever was on the other end to get their ass to the grocery store. Roommate? Auntie? After she hung up, my mother took her aside and slipped her some bills for cab fare. By the time Dad drove us to the train station that afternoon, Tutu was totally cool with the whole thing. “We’re gonna have us a fine old time,” she said as soon as we got out of the car. And we did. Man, did we ever.
I have to admit I felt like a jerk riding the train in with my maid—but no one gave us a second look and she just read her Bible the whole time. It was freezing outside of Penn Station and there was this wicked wind blowing down Seventh Avenue (I kept looking for the whores in the Simon & Garfunkel song) and we had to wait half an hour for a cab but I didn’t mind because we were in the City and I was storing up everything to tell Kim. We got stuck in traffic around Times Square and Tutu kept muttering about all the porno skin flicks and then this wino tried to open the door of the taxi and Tutu hit the lock button just in time but then she rolled down the window to scream at him: “Step off, fool!” I just sat back and let it wash over me.
“We’re in Harlem, Sammy,” she said once we crossed 110th Street—but to me it didn’t look any different than the rest of the city. More black people on the sidewalks. More liquor stores and check-cashing joints and Afro-hair beauty parlors. But from the way my parents talked about it, I was expecting—I don’t know—this war zone with gun-toting gangs and muggers throwing rocks. Actually, it did get a little weird when we hit 145th Street and there were flames shooting out of a trash can on the corner and a bunch of guys standing around drinking out of paper bags and chucking the empties into the flames in a shower of sparks. “Don’t pay those bums any mind,” Tutu told me. She must have smelled the fear on me—like sweat. Skinny white boy sweat.
Her apartment is on Edgecombe Avenue (never heard of it before) on a block of brownstones mixed with modern buildings—but a lot of the brownstones were just boarded-up shells and the modern buildings were ugly brick apartment houses with bars on the windows and rickety fire escapes sagging from floor to floor. Tutu lives in one of those. It smelled kinda funky in the lobby, like an old pair of sneakers. The elevator was just about big enough for me and Tutu to stand side by side and it took forever to get to the fourth floor. My lucky number! She undid the locks and threw open the front door and pushed me inside ahead of her, then shut the door and relocked it. She must have seen the look in my eyes when she turned on the lights. It was like being in a time machine with the dial turned back a decade. Every single thing in her living room was something that used to be in our living room—green couch, brown leather recliner, even lamps and end tables—all of it jammed into a space half the size of my bedroom. “I bet you never wondered where all your old stuff ended up, did you, Sammy?” she said in that mocking way of hers. “Your mama gave me every stick and plate and doodad—whenever she redecorated, I got the castoffs.” It was exactly the way our place looked when I was eight—except for the color picture of blond blue-eyed Jesus on the wall. It made me want to curl up on the sofa with my blanket and watch Looney Tunes (she even had our old TV). The only thing I didn’t recognize was a mini-sofa facing our big old green one. “That’s my new sofa bed,” Tutu said proudly. “Where you’ll be sleeping.” Everything smelled of Lemon Pledge, like she’d spray-painted the whole apartment with it.
My mother had told Tutu not to go to any trouble—“Just give him a couple of slices of pizza, he’ll be fine”—but I was glad that she fixed my favorite dinner. London broil, mashed potatoes, onion gravy, and peas. She told me to watch TV while she cooked—just like at home, only there was no door or anything between living room and kitchen (which was about the size of a glorified broom closet), and when we shoehorned ourselves around the table, she was the boss. Actually, she looked like a duchess with her back straight against that rickety little chair and a big glossy wig fluffed around her face. I never noticed before that she has freckles too—like tiny brown ink blots spattered on the yellowing parchment of her skin. “Don’t you dare touch that food before we pray,” she snapped. “You folks may be godless heathens but in my house we say grace before we eat.” I can’t remember the whole thing but it started with “Heavenly Father” and ended with “in Jesus’s name amen.” She stared me down until I said “amen” too—and then she smiled and picked up her fork.
We didn’t say anything for a while—I just sat there and ate and looked around at her stuff (the only picture she had on the wall aside from Jesus was a faded newspaper cutout of Dr. King standing before a huge crowd on the National Mall). I kept thinking about how Kim said, “Get her talking—find out about her family and stuff,” so finally I cleared my throat and went, “Um—you know, Tutu, you’ve been with us all my life but I hardly know anything about you. How come you never talk about yourself?”
“How come you never asked?” was her reply. “I’ve been working in white folks’ homes for going on fifty years now and not once in all that time has anyone asked me that question.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked me in the eye. “I never could figure out if they didn’t care—or if they just didn’t see me. Like I was part of the furniture I was supposed to dust. Don’t pay the maid any mind—she loves scrubbing our toilets. After a while I stopped expecting anything else. But I always had a feeling you were different, Sammy. You know why you’re my favorite?”
“Because I was born on your birthday.”
She shook her head. “It’s your soul. God gave you a sweet soul and that’s something you can’t lose. Sweet and honest as the day is long. You’d’ve gotten in ten times less trouble if you knew how to lie, but you don’t. And that’s a good thing—you better believe it.”
Her eyes were brimming and suddenly mine were too, which just made her snort. At least she didn’t call me a sissy. Then she changed the subject. “You brought along that black notebook of yours?” Does anything escape her? “I see how you scribble in that little book, writing those stories of yours. Well, when you get home, Sammy, get out that notebook and write this down. You know how I always say I have two heads? My mama had two heads too and her mama before her. One head for now. One head for then. We never had much of anything. But we do have our stories.”
Sam set down his pen, slipped the diary into the bottom desk drawer, and called Kim. After the tenth ring he gave up, stripped down to his undies, and turned off the light. The cold sheets raised a rash of goose bumps on his arms and legs. He lay on his back staring straight up. No chance of sleep the way his mind was churning. There was just enough light coming through the slats of the venetian blinds for him to make out the crack that zigzagged across the bedroom ceiling. His mother once told him that the plaster had split when Tutu fell out of bed—her room was directly over his—and for years he believed it. Naturally.
Sam lay there with his hands crossed behind his head, willing the crack to heal. Tutu always told the truth—he was sure of it—but he was having trouble with some of what she’d told him late that night in her apartment. “The blood of presidents runs in my veins.” Her exact words. Sam shook his head against the pillow. Tutu? Kin to George Washington? She said that her people came from the Northern Neck of Virginia, birthplace of three of the first five presidents—Washington, Madison, and Monroe—slaveholders every one. “Course my folks weren’t from the Northern Neck. You’re not from someplace that you were brought to as a slave. See this bright skin? That color came to me from a white master. Slave master is what I’m talking about.” Tutu claimed that her people and George Washington’s people were the same people, only her people were their secret black bastards. “Maybe not old George himself but some kin of his got children on our womenfolk. They should put that in your history books, Sammy.”
Sam tried to conjure it. George Washington grabbing the washerwoman by the waist, pulling her down, splitting her open, getting up afterward to dust off his wig, averting his eyes when the little ginger-colored slave baby was born. Tutu’s great-great-great-whatever. Holy Jesus. But why would she say it if it wasn’t true? And that other stuff—the terrible evil stuff he couldn’t write, wouldn’t write, didn’t know how to write. After all that happened, how could Tutu stand working for white folks? White men. How could she even look at them?
Sam shut his eyes, forcing himself back to that night in her apartment. It was late. The dishes were done and put away. He wanted to watch TV, maybe catch the end of the Knicks game, but Tutu summoned him. “Sit with me, Sammy.” She was at her kitchen table. “Something I need to tell you.” So he sat down across from her, praying she wasn’t going to make him pray again. “Something bad,” she started in, and took a deep breath. “Something that happened to me when I was your age.” Sam pictured a bony, shy, bow-legged Tutu, squinting a little, as pretty as she was ever going to be. “I needed work, Sammy. I couldn’t stand another day in that cabin with my mama and those steaming tubs of clothes. So I took the bus over to the next town. There was an oyster plant there—fish house we called it—where they hired black folks to shuck. I went around to the back door the way I knew I was supposed to. ‘You ever shucked before, girl?’ the owner asked. Mr. Norton his name was. ‘Yes, sir,’ I told him, though it was a lie. ‘You prepared to live here?’ he asked. Beside the fish house, on the other side of a creek, stood a row of shanties, plank and tar-paper shacks rattling in the wind off the bay. Oyster shells heaped everywhere. ‘Girls in the three shacks to the left,’ Mr. Norton told me. ‘Boys on the right. I’ll pay you sixty-five cents a gallon. Sundays off. We patrol those shanties every night—my son Mr. Jamie and me. Any trouble and you’re out. Got it?’
“But there was trouble, Sammy. How could there not be? The plant foreman, he locked us in at night and made us do our business in a nasty little pot, but the girls in my shanty kept a shim hidden by the door so they could jimmy the lock when they needed to. There was an empty shanty at the end of the row—everyone whispered about it—and one night I crept over there with a shucker named Crusoe Nickens. Tall lanky fellow, as smooth as silk. All the girls set their cap for Crusoe, but I got him. Or he got me. By Christmas I was carrying his baby. Not that I told anyone, not even Crusoe. I just figured that when the time came the good Lord would look out for me. Meanwhile, I pried open oyster shells ten hours a day six days a week till my fingers cracked and bled. Try as I might, I never could wash that fish stink off.
“Whenever the shuckers made a ruckus at night, Mr. Norton came running down the hill with his shotgun, threw open the shanty door, and fired in the air till the noise simmered down. That was a good night. On a bad night, Mr. Norton sent his son Mr. Jamie. Mr. Jamie wasn’t past his midthirties, but he already had a gut hanging over his belt. Stank of liquor too half the time, which only made him meaner. The other girls warned me: ‘When Mr. Jamie comes, just pretend you’re sleeping. Don’t look him in the eye. Keep the covers up.’”
Tutu paused and laid a hand over her heart, like she was pledging allegiance. Her brimming eyes were fixed on the table. “One cold night in January, I got to feeling queasy. I knew the other girls would kill me if I upchucked in that stuffy little shack. I was quick and light on my feet. I could move like a cat if I held my breath. Don’t you laugh, Sammy. I was young once too. When I couldn’t take the cramps anymore, I put on my robe and slipped out before anyone cracked an eyelid. There was a privy behind the shacks and that’s where I emptied my stomach. A voice inside my head kept whispering, ‘Go back,’ but the sky was full of stars and the cold air settled me. There was a rickety little dock beside the fish house that ran out into the cove. I was halfway down, shivering and clutching my robe, when I heard the boards thud behind me. Footsteps—heavy footsteps. I knew without turning: Mr. Jamie walking off his drunk. ‘Who’s this little yaller gal?’ he said all sly and husky when he came close. ‘Let’s see what you got hiding under that robe.’
“Nobody could tell yet that I was carrying a baby.
“The dock was slick with ice gleaming at the edges like knives. A couple of boats were tied alongside and one had an anchor pulled up next to the engine. Me and Mr. Jamie stood there staring each other down. The cold air turned our breath to smoke. Every puff was like a bomb going off. My mama used to say that if you’re carrying a child and you let another man put his seed in you, it will cripple your baby. That’s all I could think about when Mr. Jamie set his hands on the robe and started tugging. ‘Time was, all you bitches were free for the picking.’ His very words. I pushed him off me and ran.
“I heard the footsteps pounding behind. I heard the curse when his shoe slipped on the ice. I heard the crack and the splash of his body. That water was cold but it wasn’t deep. I could have pulled him out. I could have run up to the big house and called for help. I could have roused the men shuckers in their shanty. I didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t think. I didn’t pray. And I did not turn around. I ran back to shore, got the shim, and when my hands quit shaking, opened the lock and slipped into my bed. If anybody saw me, they didn’t say a word—not then and not the next day either when they fished his body out of the water.
“It was him or me,” Tutu whispered. “That’s what I thought at the time, Sammy. But now I know better. It was him and me.”
She reached across the table to grab his hands, still not looking at him. “Don’t you ever breathe one word of this to anybody.” Tears were running down her cheeks. “Ever.”
“Why me?” he pleaded. “Why keep this secret all these years and then lay it on me now?”
“Because it eased my heart to say it. And I know I can trust you, Sammy.”
sam rolled onto his side and pulled the covers over his head. His teeth were chattering. What about his heart?
If it weren’t so cold, he’d have gotten out of bed, pulled the diary out of the drawer, started writing again. The truth this time. The taxi to Harlem, the cramped little elevator, the cast-off furniture, the London broil and peas: he’d filled page after page, but all he’d done was doodle. He hadn’t even gotten to the secret grandson who’d gone to church with them on Sunday morning. Long tall Leon. How had Tutu kept that hidden all these years?
It was obvious. They saw what they wanted to see—Sam no different from his parents. He was never going to amount to anything as a writer until he learned to see the truth: to look into people’s hearts. Starting with his own. But how?
An hour passed and Sam was still awake and shivering. He thought about creeping up the steps, knocking on Tutu’s door, waking her up. But it would probably just give her a heart attack. “Remember, Sammy,” she’d said to him that night in her apartment, right before he fell asleep. “No one’s ever gonna look out for you but God.” It sounded almost like a threat, but then she leaned over and put her lips on his forehead. She never kissed Sam at home.
When Sam finally fell asleep, he had the drowning dream again. The one where he’s lying facedown in the pool and his neck is fused and his lungs are bursting and finally he surrenders and inhales and the water gags him like vomit. Only this time it was different. It wasn’t the pool—it was Long Island Sound. He and Kim were running down the dock by the boathouse. Kim was in front, he was trying to catch her. Right at the end, she stopped dead and turned on him. As Sam lunged for her embrace, she stepped aside and tripped him. “Richard!” he heard her call. “Richard, wait!” But he was sinking beneath the rancid surface, heart on fire. Sinking. Suffocating. Inhaling. Choking. Drowning. “Richard, wait!” was pounding inside his head when he jolted awake.