I. THE GEEKS OF MULBERRY HIGH
New York, 1967
10. THERE WAS SOMETHING strange about 1967 for the other geeks of Mulberry High; ’66 was the last of the summers they spent happily abstinent. Content with decoding glances and walks from a safe distance around the skate park. Content with getting splashed at the pool, or dunked, dragged in by the arm and made to scream and curse and play pissed. Maybe meeting a crush later on in some hiding place, under trees in Central Park North or the car-shop lot where the few Black Columbia kids performed Shakespeare plays, braids still wet from what the boys had done at the pool. The brave among them might kiss with their eyes closed and their hands to themselves.
But in the summer of ’67, an urgency descended, a yearning for more. Bonnie watched the other geeks as they approached the boys carefully, in pin-curled and cornrowed ones and twos. The notorious lunch rabble of twelve loud virgins became something quieter, more self-conscious, as the end of senior year approached.
Bonnie observed her classmates carefully and listened closely, keeping her eyes on the drawings of her hovercraft in her lap. She always drew in her lap, was protective of the talent that was her only connection to her past. The one thing about her that only her mother knew.
When Bonnie first revealed a talent for drawing, in the Paris summer of ’55, Claudine panicked. It was not dance, her own noose, but it was still an art form: a reliable predictor of another generation of chaos. Claudine did not speak a single word when presented with the thirty portraits of her that Bonnie had made for her birthday. She’d rendered her mother in every available medium from an upstairs neighbor’s stash: charcoal, watercolor, pencil, crayon. She’d drawn her dressed in tatty robes and torn dresses; in jeans and in the nude; fresh from the bathtub. Her breasts low, her waistline as crooked, her face just as gaunt and tired as it looked in the mirror.
Claudine was Bonnie’s only subject, and she’d captured her in each portrait with an exactness that felt vengeful. True in a way that felt cruel to someone that took great pains to never see themselves clearly. And though Claudine knew the child meant no harm, had meant in fact to express her love, shame drove her to tear each rendering into tiny pieces. Pieces she never meant for the child to find in the very bottom of the trash can. But Bonnie did.
In the cafeteria, Bonnie added dimension to the hovercraft, layering and layering until the pencil blackened her fingertips, bringing it to life as she listened to the geeks tell their stories of virginities lost.
Berniece returned to lunch after the weekend it happened, silent, fiddling with cold fries. Her icy coke turned to bubbleless black water before she finally sipped. Pearl returned singing high as Minnie Riperton’s first note on “Completeness,” suddenly in possession of a rare octave that drew Mrs. Walton from the teacher’s lounge to pressure her to sing in chorus.
By the summertime, everyone thought that Bonnie had left the geeks because she was getting too pretty, but the truth was, she was embarrassed. Any day now, the time would come for her to tell her story, and she knew she wouldn’t have anything to say.
Bonnie finds a summer job at a sunny deli on Prince Street. Her first job. The only time she is allowed out of the house, let alone in SoHo, without prompting panic from her grandmother, Sylvia. I lost both of my children to this world. Another lecture on the darkness and danger of America beyond their yard.
The deli owner lets Bonnie bring her albums to work. She plays Oscar Peterson all day on the loudspeaker and finds herself asking for customers’ orders in the rhythms that he plays, swaying, dancing, marking his high C in the air with her fingertips. She doesn’t even notice that she’s doing this until a person ordering a pastrami sandwich flashes her a self-conscious smile. “Sorry,” she mutters. But Oscar once again owns the rhythm of her hands as she counts the man’s change.
Her first job was strategically chosen, a place right across from a crowded basketball court where she can watch boys play for hours in the netless hoops. She isn’t ready to approach (or be approached), but she watches for boys the way her grandmother told her boys watch for girls. And when the boys come from the basketball court to the deli’s counter, very rarely, but sometimes, she feels them in her bones something like the way she feels music.
But nobody knows. She masks any moments of enchantment with a gruffness that becomes legendary. Young people wandering the block or grown folks on their way back from church crowd the deli on sweaty summer weekends to see her cut boys down. The whole place cackles at her quick retorts to one-liners, catcalls, and unsolicited phone numbers. Some turn venomous as they stumble, shamed out the door.
“Ugly-ass bitch.”
Others get more persistent, crowding the deli counter with flowers until the owner begs her to give one of the young men a chance.
“He’s a good kid. For God’s sake, who are you waitin’ for?”
Then there is the man in a sports car, a soap actor every other person in the deli recognizes. They tell her that he appeared on Days of Our Lives. He waits patiently at the back of the line. When it’s his turn, he doesn’t pretend to want food, just tells a story of seeing Bonnie in the window as he was driving by.
“Let me take you to dinner,” he says. The roar of the car pours in from the street, the glass door still wide open from his wild pull. The deli is silent, waiting.
“Is that your car?” she says, eyes on the bread she’s buttering.
“Sure is, sweetness.”
“Then your vehicle is parked illegally. Please move it.” She turns her back to hide her smile as she slips the bread into the toaster. The people howl.
“You are stone cold, young lady! Stone cold. Don’t ever change,” an old Black woman says as she takes her brisket and goes out the door.
Friendless that summer after breaking it off with the geeks, Bonnie confides more and more in her coworker from the night shift, a Black Panther who’s done some time and still has the scent of prison (wet bricks, blood, plaster, a hint of madness) on her body. In the breezy Manhattan evenings, the woman walks with her to the bus, the subway, always telling her she shouldn’t be alone so much.
“Be careful out here, sis. You got a mouth on you, but I can tell you can’t fight.”
They prepare a corporate catering order by a single overhead light after the shop is closed to the public. As always, Oscar Peterson plays quietly beneath them. Bonnie describes what she imagines love would be like, or at least what she hopes for. The woman laughs a little.
“So, if you never find some boy that makes you feel like Cinderella, you never gon’ be with nobody?”
Bonnie shrugs, slicing bell peppers. Bonnie finally asks the question she can’t ask anyone else.
“What does it feel like?”
“With men?” the woman asks in a quieter voice, understanding Bonnie’s question. Bonnie nods. The woman takes a moment before answering, “It’s cool. But women … women do something different. We bring our souls to it.”
The woman seems to be happily married, speaks often of her husband and son, but Bonnie watches some longing pass over her face as she speaks.
“Do you really wanna be with him forever?”
“My husband? Yeah, that’s my husband,” the woman says, biting the fresh mozzarella she’s supposed to put on a sandwich.
“But what if there’s more? What if you could feel more with somebody else?” Bonnie asks, earnestly, relieved to get out the questions she’s been holding in for years. But the woman looks back at her, a motherly exhaustion.
“You too deep, sis. Way too deep. And look how you makin’ that sandwich … the olive oil and sautéed onions. One twist of pepper, two twists of salt. Wiping off the knife between the mustard and the mayonnaise. I’m through twenty of these and you barely got five. How you gon’ keep that up for every single one?”
11. THEIR SUPER CALLS THE DELI. Bonnie’s grandmother is at Mount Sinai Hospital. She hails a cab and sits on the edge of her seat, trembling with the road the whole way to Brooklyn.
She runs down the hallway of the skylit atrium, dodging the aides pushing wheelchairs in both directions. Blinds block the view into her grandmother’s room, so she pounds on the glass. A nurse opens the door to reveal Sylvia lying down, her eyes open, knees up in bed, a meditative figure before a crowd of white coats. She seems overly cool (excessively medicated?), in a separate realm altogether. It is a teaching hospital and the crowd of doctors is not so much tending to her as they are observing her, leaning close and away again, taking notes, speaking over her and to one another. Lights flash from several machines, as if a roll of photographs is being shot in rapid succession.
The crowd soon dissipates, and Bonnie recognizes one of the doctors. Emmanuel Alvi has a mother living in the same senior community as Sylvia, one of her dear friends, so he’s been to their apartment from time to time to pick her up, replace a fan, or bring a rug back from the cleaners. Her grandmother knows him well, but Bonnie only knows him in passing.
He stands before her now. She notes the dark hair on his chest, peeking out from his scrubs, the way he only smells sterile, his natural scent erased by his profession.
Outside the room, they chat about her grandmother, and he doesn’t seem worried by the initial observations, so she relaxes, accepting his invitation to lunch in the hospital cafeteria. He’s invited her to lunch before, in fact, and to dinner often. She’s always said sure—the kind of agreement they both know lives comfortably between a no and a yes—but she’s never showed up.
So, this time, when she says, “Sure,” he asks her: “Is that really a yes? The cafeteria is right downstairs.”
He gestures to a sign five steps in front of them with an arrow pointing downward. This morning has disrupted her routine, forced her into an uncommon sense of freedom, so she accepts this man’s invitation. He says, “Cool,” before disappearing.
Before going, she peeks into her grandmother’s room again. She is awake but Bonnie doesn’t want to enter, doesn’t want to disturb her. A nurse is combing Sylvia’s long silver hair, plaiting a section of it in that underhanded pattern that Bonnie had always found so difficult to grasp. Bonnie watches intently, needing to know, all of sudden, what her grandmother’s hair feels like.
As a child, after she left Paris and came to New York to live with her grandmother, Bonnie looked for holes in women. Her grandmother had none. The woman seemed self-sufficient, and stoic to a fault, so Bonnie looked to their neighbors in the assisted living facility. She looked for loneliness, for those with children who did not visit or call. Misunderstood women who accrued unwanted gifts: large baskets of expensive things they did not eat, clothes they did not like. She looked for those whose children called with rounds of fast questions without waiting for answers, the women’s speech stumbling from excitement to dishonesty as they spewed the short answers that would appease their busy children. Yes, yes, fine, fine. She looked for dreamers, intellectual women who were called antisocial, uncooperative, insane. Women who were grandmothers and not grandmas, whose silent natures intimidated their attendants and were punished in turn with no eye contact and harsh handling, their breasts lifted to scrub under and then dropped hard. She looked for overthinkers, worriers, strategists who’d borne children and married to give their lives meaning but, now alone in old age, found their passion, their ambition, ever present and unsatisfied.
She learned from these women how the world worked, that she had to know what she wanted out of life in order to move through it. Inaction and ambivalence, it seemed, had given these women their holes.
She climbed into them. Succeeded at almost replacing children, husbands, pets, friendships. She did their grocery shopping, discussed their pains, sneaked them chocolate and whiskey after hours. They were mostly white New Yorkers, women who remained in Fort Greene, undeterred by the neighborhood’s new Black demography. They delighted in Bonnie’s beauty, good diction, quick wit, and poise. And she mistook their admiration for affection.
Ms. Mallory, a neighbor with Alzheimer’s, once called Bonnie by her daughter’s name. At first Bonnie corrected her. But still, every time the woman woke up from a nap during Bonnie’s visit, she would call her Delilah.
For about a month, Bonnie enjoyed Ms. Mallory’s attention as she passed for her daughter. It came in loving gazes she would catch from the woman. A smile that was a language unto itself, a deep happiness she seemed to evoke in Ms. Mallory by simply being. It was the wanting to know what Bonnie’s day had been like, listening to the details with such attention that the two of them breathed in tandem, Bonnie’s dream of being known fulfilled.
But one day the real Delilah visited. Bonnie watched Ms. Mallory and her daughter together, the woman’s love going back to where it rightly belonged, and not long after, when she visited Ms. Mallory again, the woman opened the door and stared too long. She asked Bonnie what her name was and told her that children were not allowed in the assisted-living facility unaccompanied.
Then Bonnie found herself running from the door. Racing without knowing why, down the long hallway, only stopping, finally, at the parking lot. Panting with her hands on her knees. A man worked quietly on a car alone, his palms black with grease. She watched, imagining that was the color, the texture, of her insides. And with that thought came a calm and strangely numbing feeling.
Her soul vowed to keep its distance from people. A boundary, now as she ages, that strangles more than it comforts. She wonders if it might be possible to break free of it, to overcome this feeling and get back into the world—or if, maybe, she will one day run into something, someone, who can take it away.
12. THEY MEET IN THE empty café of the hospital. Aides and doctors rush around the gray room, clutching paper bags of day-old bagels with the desperation of the homeless. Emmanuel is already seated, his head hanging forward as if he’s taking a nap.
“Hi, Bonnie,” he says, not lifting his head.
He makes small talk, strange small talk, as he opens the folder of X-rays and diagnoses that he has yet to look at and spreads the papers across the table.
Bonnie feels exposed when he asks her what she had for breakfast. Had she eaten? Did she want anything? A bagel, toasted maybe? Hiding herself, she says no.
“Are you seeing anyone?” he asks suddenly, and then seems to hold his breath.
She has seen Emmanuel’s wife at holiday parties in the senior facility. Always coming through briefly in that way important people do. Busy, stylish, childless.
All she knows is that she works in the music industry, a detail from her grandmother that makes the woman even more intriguing. She remembers his wife’s musky perfume, her damp raincoat brushing against Bonnie’s arm in the building hallway. The woman was polite. Excuse me, she’d said.
“Are you seeing anyone?” he asks again, now impatient, irritated, as if she is depriving him of something he needs immediately, like a key to the bathroom. She still doesn’t respond to him, wanting to see what more he’ll do to get an answer.
She notices Sylvia King in cursive poking out in the pile of X-rays. She holds it up to the cafeteria’s dim light.
Her grandmother’s leaning skeleton. It is strange to see her from the inside. Even her bones make a pose that means business. Through the light, her lungs look like a sky full of too many stars. There is dark matter here, more toward her abdomen.
“No one told me about this,” she says.
“Bonnie, I’m sure she’s fine,” he assures her. Pockets of air, a little gas, anything. The ward’s primary doctors will be looking into it. No one was concerned about her lungs. But at Bonnie’s insistence, they go to his office to examine the image more carefully.
“My timing must be terrible.” His voice echoes as they stand in his cold office with the lights off, the door closed, her grandmother’s X-ray perched on the lit board. “I just didn’t know when else I’d have time alone with you.”
He turns to the X-ray. She watches his face turn slack.
After a few minutes: “It’s blood.”
Shame—or fear—in his voice. The blood and chafed bone have likely been floating around Sylvia’s chest for a few years, maybe more. Emmanuel orders more X-rays, calls his subordinates and superiors.
They discover within hours that her grandmother’s ribs have punctured her lungs. The miniscule specs of blood have been overlooked by specialists who have been monitoring her dementia, anemia, back spasms, sluggish heart rate—everything except her lungs.
“How could they miss this?” Bonnie asks Emmanuel hours later in his office. Her back against the wall, her head tilted to the ground.
“I’m going to take care of it, Bonnie,” he says. She watches as he pours over the files. A decade of X-rays, blood work, and charts spread across his table. The lights are on now. He comes and goes from the room, returning with nurses, specialists, and administrative staff. Bonnie curls up like a snail and falls asleep on the couch in the far corner of his office, sweating cold, waking hours later to hear the quiet words of the doctor’s, the words that begin to change things.
The following morning, back at home, she calls Emmanuel. She asks him if the coma Sylvia slipped into is related to the lung puncture.
“It could be,” he says.
“So … so she’s dead,” Bonnie says, not a question, the word made certain under its weight. She clears her voice, hoarse from a lack of sleep, takes another bite from her Snickers.
“Are you OK?”
“Is she dead.” It happens again. Bonnie can’t make it a question.
“She could still wake up. It happens.”
Bonnie lies on the floor of her grandmother’s kitchen, feeling the cracks in the tiles, places shaped by Sylvia’s feet over the years she walked these tiles, over the years she integrated this place, its first Black resident. Bonnie shivers: malnutrition, dehydration, sleep deprivation. Her heart can’t settle, can’t tell if it is time to love harder or let go.
Still on the phone, she can hear Emmanuel’s wife in the background, speaking to him in Urdu.
“There’s too much noise,” Bonnie mumbles bitterly.
“I said, Miss Sylvia hasn’t been out long. She could wake up.”
The wife says something else.
“Hold on,” he says to Bonnie.
The line goes quiet for what feels like a long time. Too long. Her tired eyes wander around the room. To the mail on the floor that she’d searched and then thrown on the ground. Nothing from her mother, as usual. She’s written to an old Detroit address, the only address she could find among her grandmother’s things. She thinks—hopes—the coma will be the excuse, the drama needed, maybe, to finally get her mother to reply, after years without a word from her.
He calls her back many hours later, after midnight. She tells him what she overheard the doctors saying. About sixty-eight years being more than enough life for her grandmother, dismissing their neglect. He begins to apologize but she interrupts.
“I want to see you,” she says. She hangs up the phone quickly.
A day later, Emmanuel drives from Brooklyn to Little Italy, where they eat at three different restaurants on the same street. Antipasto after antipasto after antipasto. It’s what she wants. Shucking oysters under dusty awnings, slipping sideways through the sticky bodies of a crowded street fair. She spends fifteen dollars buying mugs, compasses, a small porcelain doll, beads for cornrows she’s planning to have done (now that her grandmother’s not around to stop her), wares from around the world. She has never had this kind of freedom, has never roamed around New York City just for kicks.
And on this excursion in the city, she discovers that she can pretend to be in a universe in which her grandmother is home drinking sherry, sorting her card deck on the veranda, beating Bonnie’s ass at spades and talking politics. All the things Malcolm had done right (He was such a good-looking kid), and what the hell was wrong with that girl Nina Simone (Her hair!)?
What’s your plan? What’s your plan? Sylvia would say, looking over Bonnie’s shoulder, assessing the quality of her hand. Start light. What’s your plan, little girl? You have to win in your mind before you start.
As Bonnie licks gelato on this street in Little Italy, her grandmother is not in a coma, she is neither dead nor undead, and Bonnie’s terrors can go unstirred for a few hours.
She stops at a table of antique handmade globes. She plays with one, watching countries and oceans spin into a blur.
“I want to leave here. I want to travel the world,” Bonnie whispers to herself. She walks on ahead of Emmanuel and says no more. They walk down a cobblestone street in lower Manhattan. Fire escapes hang above their heads from the sides of a giant warehouse. When he reaches for her hand, she pulls away and puts it in her pocket.
13. AS THE WEEKS GO ON, Emmanuel begins to express frustration with the hospital, with his life as an ER doctor and departmental manager. He makes a confession he’s made to no one else—that for almost a decade, he has wanted to return to Pakistan, a country he only lived in for the first six years of his life and has, given its own unrest, probably romanticized. Still, he desperately wants to go back. This they share: a nagging feeling that America is not quite home. And for this and her obvious isolation, Bonnie seems an ideal vessel for Emmanuel’s secrets: a solitary life no one else enters and exits, a place where his most private feelings are safe.
He’s long given up on distinguishing himself in a profession that is, after seven years, essentially clerical: filing, writing, inputting data while his patients seldom recover.
His wife, Rabia, sleeps alone, has slept alone for most of their marriage. He prefers the couch in the living room and eventually, the one in his office. He thought, at first, that it was only a matter of convenience. But he soon realized that the problem was her. Rabia’s body heat, imprinted on the mattress beside him when she rose for work, had become a cypher of death: what remains when his patient dies. For him, the warmth a body leaves behind is not a comfort, it is the final evidence of life. Sharing a bed feels like endless mourning.
Still, he feels guilty about the life he’s given her, about the law school classes he refused to pay for, afraid, he says, of losing her to her ambition. In the end, after working first as an aide at the hospital and then as a secretary at a day care center, his wife saved enough money to put herself through law school. She is now the first female head of Artists & Repertoire for a small Manhattan record label. Once he says all this, Bonnie looks away from where they sit on a park bench to the swings across the way. She’s staring intently at the empty swing the wind pushes the hardest, its chains whining loudly in the breeze.
“I’ve never done it before,” she says, squinting against the sun.
“Swing? Never?”
“No. I told you. My grandmother’s paranoid. I didn’t go to parks. I didn’t go anywhere.” She looks down at the dirt, drawing a circle with her shoe. When she looks back at him, Bonnie tells him that he can kiss her if he wants to. She offers it bluntly, her elbow on the park table, holding up her chin as she examines him. A look that could suggest anything from arousal to the possibility that he has something in his teeth. No matter how he tries, she is impossible to read.
“You feel that bad for me, huh?”
“Yeah, you’re pretty pathetic,” she says easily, earnestly, in a way that somehow doesn’t sting. She has the gift, or maybe the curse, of a frank nature.
When he kisses her, he tells her breathlessly that it’s like pressing his lips to a spring. Her lips are thick—she knew this and liked them on her own terms, but the way he says it makes her smile. So different from his wife’s. It makes him wonder how everything else would feel with her. He leans in again.
That’s how it begins.
14. MONTHS PASS and the coma persists. Bonnie wanders around the Alvis’ apartment every morning before heading to work, Emmanuel’s wife always already gone for the day. Bonnie’s saddle oxfords squeak on the hardwood as she stops and looks at the wall of records, organized in alphabetical order. She feels his eyes on her moisturized legs.
She’d offered Emmanuel her grandmother’s ticket to her high school graduation, an invitation to see her present at the closing ceremony of the Science Honors Society. But he’d been busy. His reaction to her admission to Yale (“How’d you pull that off?”) bothered her too. She’d forfeited the acceptance anyway, never mailing the letter to confirm her enrollment, through with being one of two, three Black girls in her class. Yale was just another Mulberry High.
Now he asks if she’s been to the hospital to check up on her grandmother, and she lies.
She peruses the record collection closely. He has many of the albums she grew up on. In a tone akin to accusing him of theft, she asks why. Why do you have all this Black music? She is jealous, deeply possessive of Sarah Vaughan, of Ella Fitzgerald, of Ray Charles, the members of her imagined family.
“Everybody loves them. They’re the standard,” he says, perplexed and excited by the strength of her reaction. As they discuss these albums, she seduces him with the nuance of her analysis. Mingus shouldn’t play Mingus. Mingus is better in softer hands.
Her sense of what music means, of how it feels, is complex and prodigious. He tells her that his wife is hiring for small jobs at the label. He mentions it in passing—a mistake, as he is quickly exhausted by how relentless and persistent her follow-up questions are. But soon, he’s committed to getting her an interview at Onyx Records for a proofreading position. She’ll have to wait, though. The position won’t officially be open until the spring.
As she walks, inventing a longer route to delay seeing Sylvia at the hospital, Bonnie returns again and again to Emmanuel’s words. So Black music can belong to him too. It was hard to process an identity that seemed to have no gatekeepers—its roots breeding, building, breaking under everything America was. She’d taken her mother’s words literally, and she thought again of them now. Who was she if the sound of her people belonged to the world?
Back when Bonnie and Claudine still lived in Paris, there was a fight in the apartment below them. A couple at war, screaming and launching everything they owned at each other. Bonnie remembers this moment because her mother was holding her, a rare and cherished thing. She spoke into her ear, explaining conflict. The cause of most trouble between people wasn’t difference, but twinhood. On the inside, everybody has a sound, Claudine had said. Some people are crying all the time. Some are always sighing. The sound of yourself, she’d said, is whatever you can’t stand to hear from other people. And whatever you look like to yourself is what you can’t stand to see.
At the hospital, the darkness and coolness of Sylvia’s room makes it easy, easier than she thought it would be, to come close. She dares to touch her grandmother’s hair. Feeling it for the first time. Cotton-soft strands, too fine to resist static. Just as she’d hoped it would be, it is her mother’s hair. She closes her eyes, savoring this feeling of belonging, of being part of at least two other people in the world. And as if to say that she belongs to her too, Sylvia’s breathing grows fiercer. Breaths that are deep, loud, harder than those of anybody Bonnie knows among the living.
The nurse peeks in, sees hope in Bonnie’s eyes. As gently as she can, the woman says, “She does that,” pulling the edge of the blanket over the unconscious woman’s whitening feet before disappearing again.
But Bonnie has never heard a breath more determined. It is strange to Bonnie that a woman who lived her last decades so quietly, sleeping her years away behind the shady oaks of a senior home, wants to die so outrageously loud. Bonnie considers for the first time that there was once more to this woman than she knows. That perhaps it is not the quiet, not the folding of fitted sheets, the snapping of rollers into hair, but this sound, this defiance, that is truly hers.