The Bernice L. McFadden Collection, page 39
I rounded the corner and started toward the elevator. Two men, boys really, stood huddled near the entranceway of the elevator. One boy was tall and dark with a long thin scar that ran the length of his cheek. He wore a bright orange baseball cap and an army fatigue jacket. He had one Timberland boot–covered foot cocked up against the door of the elevator, propping it open for the light while he counted the roll of five- and ten-dollar bills he held in his hands. The other boy was smaller, just as dark, and wore a tattered brown leather jacket that hung too big on his small frame; he sported two diamond studs in his ear. They both looked up as I approached.
“Hey, girl,” Orange Baseball Cap called out to me.
I nodded and said hello and even forced a smile. I had to be congenial if nothing else. “Hey,” I said back and tried to tear my eyes away from the money. I considered turning around and moving toward the stairway, but the risk was too great. “Hey,” I said again and nodded my head toward the elevator.
“Take the fucking stairs,” Brown Leather Jacket mumbled beneath his breath as he watched me out of the side of his eye. He was just a baby, maybe seventeen, if that old.
“Have some fucking respect, man!” Orange Cap yelled and slapped Brown Leather Jacket in the face with the roll of money. “Move the fuck outta the way,” he said and shoved him backward.
“Here you go, miss,” Orange Cap said and stepped aside, holding the door open for me. I heard the vials of crack clinking in his pockets as he moved.
“Thanks,” I responded, still keeping my eyes away from the money and trying hard not to look at either of their faces. I stepped inside the small gray box and said a prayer.
Orange Cap didn’t let the door close right away; he just stood there smiling at me, blinding me with the row of gold fangs that covered his top front teeth. I was looking at the buttons, trying to will my finger to stop pressing number 3 over and over again. Idiot, I called myself in my mind.
My heart was racing and I was sure he could smell my fear. Finally I looked up and into Orange Cap’s face. He was cute, long lashes and nice thick lips. It made it easier for me. I smiled and said, “It don’t work if you keep the door open,” with just a sprinkle of street.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said and laughed before letting the door close. The elevator jerked upward and I leaned into the graffiti-scarred walls and thanked God for getting me through … again.
The elevator came to a stop and I stepped into the corridor. My heart was beating so loudly I couldn’t hear the sound of my footsteps as I hurried down the hallway toward my apartment. I moved quickly, careful not to kick over the empty beer bottles and crack vials that littered the black and white checked floor.
The lightbulbs had been shattered again; the soft white glass crunched lightly beneath my feet. I thanked God for the moonlight as I moved on.
I smelled pork chops and I could hear the crackle and pop of the grease as it raged against the flame. When I pushed the door open I was greeted by the blaring noise of the television; Delia kept it loud to drown out the sound of gunshots that rang in from the courtyard every night.
She was seated on the secondhand tweed couch, bent over as far as her round belly would allow as she tried desperately to paint her toenails.
“Hello,” I said and let the tension of the hall slip from my shoulders.
Delia looked up, grunted a greeting at me, and went back to her toenails.
She was barely fifty-five, but the weight she’d gained over the past few years made her look ten years older. Her hair was a mass of gray and had only recently started to grow back in around the edges. “Nerves,” the doctor had told her when it started dropping out in clumps. Delia’s eyes were vacant and they made you feel sad just to look into them. Her skin was blotchy and dark in places where Hy-Lo’s fists had visited often enough to leave behind marks that she would die with.
The heat of the apartment gathered me into its clutches, forcing beads of sweat to form on my forehead and above my lip. “It’s hot in here,” I exclaimed as I began to remove my coat.
“Uh-huh,” Delia said absently and attacked her pinky toe with the tiny brush.
The couch tilted a bit with her weight. It had probably seen twenty different apartments by the time it got to ours. The left back leg was missing and so we substituted it with two encyclopedias. The cushions were thin and growing thinner by the day. That was how Salvation Army furniture was. Overused, broken down, and shabby, just like the people who purchased it.
Shabby. That was the word that always came to mind when I walked into the apartment, greeted by the dull beige walls and peeling paint that hung from the ceiling like cobwebs. I had to bite my lip just to keep the word from spilling out of my mouth in a loud angry scream.
Shabby. That’s what would be on my tongue when I slipped the key in the lock and jiggled until the bolt slipped free. Shabby is what I saw when I saw my mother, her hair gray from worry and arms fat from Fritos and Pepsi-Cola. Shabby is what rested on the tip of my tongue, but “hello” is what I would say when I stepped in.
I sighed and came to sit beside Delia on the couch.
“I was thinking maybe next summer we could go down to Florida, maybe, um, visit with my cousin Anna and her family,” Delia said, leaning back to admire her toenails.
“Uh-huh,” I responded, not sure where she was going with this. We had not seen or spoken to Anna in about five years.
Delia lit a cigarette and took a puff between every three or four words. I looked on and listened intently. She did this when she was trying to avoid what she really wanted to say.
“Or maybe we could go on down to Sandersville and see Tessie and her husband Michael. They’re always asking us to come down. Maybe next summer …” She trailed off as she lit another cigarette.
“Uh-huh,” I responded again and went to the kitchen to turn the chops.
“Yeah, that’ll be real nice. A vacation next summer,” Delia said and reached for the nail polish again.
Do you think he’ll be dead by then?
I heard the voice inside me pipe up and I turned to see if Delia had heard it too. She hadn’t, she was focused on the second coat of red polish she was struggling to apply.
Well, do you think he’ll be dead? the voice inside me was asking, pushing, demanding.
Where will we get the money for a vacation? I thought to myself, trying to ignore the voice in my head.
Well?
Public Assistance didn’t give out enough money for plane trips and a new pair of open-toed sandals. Where would the money come from? I asked myself again, louder, way above the sound of the voice in my head.
Will he be dead?
The voice won out, its questions filling not just my mind, but every space in my body. “I don’t know!” I said aloud.
“What?” Delia yelled from the living room. “What did you say, Kenzie?”
“Nothing, Mom,” I said and bit my tongue. I felt the blood fill my mouth and I thought: Good, that’s what you get!
The voice went silent.
We sat together on the couch and watched sitcom after sitcom until finally ten o’clock rolled around and the news came on.
“Oh, please,” Delia huffed at the newscaster. She rolled her eyes and reached for the remote.
“It’s ten o’clock, Mom, it’s all that’s going to be on now,” I said and curled my arms around myself. “What’s wrong with the news?” I asked, already knowing she would ignore the question.
Delia used to like the news. “You need a world view of things,” that’s what she used to say. The world view was the real view to Delia. But now things were different and she did not want to deal with any reality except her own, and her reality was right here on the couch in this shabby apartment, no more and no less.
She preferred to lose herself in the afternoon soap operas, evening sitcoms, and late-night talk shows. We spoke to each other during commercials. Three minutes of empty chatter that touched on nothing important and never, ever stumbled onto talk of Hy-Lo. He did not exist to her. He’d been dead to her long before he lay dying in a hospital bed across town.
“Summer in Florida, yeah, that would be real nice,” Delia said again and flipped the channel away from the news.
Up until I was twelve, my summers were spent lazing beneath billowing white clouds that moved slowly over my grandmother’s house. This was Foch Boulevard, South Ozone Park, Queens, where laughter was a daily tonic and hugs and kisses were always in great abundance.
Back then, that part of Queens was still rural. Only the main streets were black-topped. Foch Boulevard was a long, narrow dirt road where raccoons roamed in search of food during the early-morning hours. It was the North imitating the South, a slice of Augusta and a wisp of Richmond right in the middle of Queens.
Large oak trees shaded Foch Boulevard; they towered above the neat one-family homes that lined the block. In the summer their branches hung heavy with glossy green leaves the size of two hands. We children would stand on our toes and pluck them free, lacing them together with needle and thread and draping them along the backyard fences as decorations for our imaginary dinner parties.
Butterflies filled our days with all the colors of the rainbow while the night glowed alive with lightning bugs. We painted our lips with the juice from wild blackberries and gorged ourselves sick with the fat green grapes that hung heavy from the vines that wrapped and weaved their way along the brick walls of the backyards.
People left their front doors unlocked and sat out on their small porches late into the summer night telling downhome stories, not caring if the next workday was just a few hours away. Summertime on Foch Boulevard came but once a year and you only got one round at life—you had to make the best of both.
It was there among the salmon- and slate-colored stones that paved the patio and bordered the small green patch of grass that was my grandmother’s yard, that I was able to be a child. For two straight months, my smile found my lips again and plastered itself happily across my face. My cuticles grew in thick and my stomach filled out round inside me.
For two months I was able to watch television until my eyes burned for sleep. For two months Malcolm and I stuffed as many Oreo cookies as we could into our mouths and then washed them down with cherry Kool-Aid. Two months of White Castle hamburgers, drive-in movies, and dancing in our underwear beneath the rushing cold water of the fire hydrant.
There were few rules in my grandmother’s house and the ones she did have were normal ones that were easy to abide by: brushing your teeth in the morning, taking a bath at night, and saying grace before a meal.
Delia would come and spend weekends with us; sometimes Hy-Lo would bring her in his long green Oldsmobile.
Malcolm and I would spot it as it turned the corner and we would dash into a neighbor’s yard and stay hidden there until he’d leave. Sometimes Hy-Lo would sit on the steps of my grandmother’s front porch and smoke, his head turning left and right, his eyes picking through the children who ran and jumped their way up and down the block hoping to spot us among them, calling us out and ending our joy.
Mable always covered for us. “They went to the beach with Jacob and Lot,” she would say, her eyes boring into Hy-Lo’s, daring him to challenge her.
Jacob and Lot were Sam’s sons from his first marriage. They lived in Dallas and would share our summers in Queens until they became too old to find sweet content on Foch Boulevard. By the time they were in their late teens, their summer visits decreased from two months to two weeks and then nothing at all.
Hy-Lo would look back at Mable, sometimes even holding her icy stare for a moment or two, but in the end he would just bounce his head and cluck his tongue. He didn’t like to run up against Mable and had little to say against Sam’s sons. He and they had come to blows once when the boys were just fourteen and fifteen. Even at that young age, they towered over Hy-Lo. They loved my mother dearly, as if she were their own flesh and blood, and protected her as such.
Hy-Lo had made the sad mistake of speaking harshly to her in their presence, and even worse, he’d snatched at her, ripping the seam of her blouse. Their assault on him was quick and furious. Hy-Lo’s words had not finished tumbling from his mouth, his hand not completely loose of Delia’s blouse, before Jacob and Lot were on him, pounding him with their large fists until he fell to the ground, where they kicked him until Sam appeared and pulled them off.
My mother had been screaming from the corner she found herself huddled in, begging for them to stop before they killed him. I sat solemn on the couch looking down on my father’s head as it knocked against the top of my foot.
I wanted to join them and kick him until his blood left a dark stain on Mable’s carpet, but instead I pulled my knees up to my chin and watched as tears of pain squeezed out from under my father’s clamped eyelids.
Sam had sent him off with rough words that Hy-Lo did not have the strength to dispute. He walked bent over out the door and to his car. Delia tried to follow, but Sam used the same tone he had on my father and ordered her to stay put. “He’ll be okay. You stay here and tend to your kids.” Delia opened her mouth once and a small broken sound escaped before she ran up the stairs and disappeared.
Sam looked at me and his eyes softened. “Go on outside, Kenzie,” he said and I obeyed immediately. He did not say a word to Jacob and Lot, but something passed between them, a vibration that I caught hold of that allowed me to understand that there would be no verbal chastising or physical punishment for their actions. The beating was a long time coming. Sam had steeled himself against being drawn into Delia and Hy-Lo’s disputes but it was becoming increasingly harder to do so.
He sighed heavily and his body shook against what could have happened had he been the one to deliver the beating. Surely his fists would have done more than bruise Hy-Lo’s ego or break his skin. His fists would have found Hy-Lo’s heart and ended its even rhythm with one hard blow.
The spring before I turned twelve years old, white men with red pinched faces, cut off T-shirts, and hard hats came to Foch Boulevard. They brought with them noisy machines: trucks loaded with gravel and smoldering black tar. They spread the tar and gravel the length of Foch Boulevard as easily as my mother spread icing across a cake, and then they flattened it with a large silver rolling pin.
Things would be different from that day on.
The oak branches dipped in misery and the grapes turned gray and shriveled up black. Porches seemed smaller, more cluttered, as people began to long for down home’s wide-open spaces. Houses went up for sale and children were ordered to stay close to home or inside all together. People walked quickly, lifting a hand in hurried greeting instead of stopping to talk.
A new element had followed the blacktop and they did not care if butterflies graced the day and lightning bugs stole the night. They laid out poison for the raccoons and chopped away the crooked limbs of the grapevines and blackberry trees.
I was different after that. I lost my taste for Twizzlers and M&Ms, my body curved in places that drew the attention of boys and men, and my mouth came loose at the sides, spilling out words that I had previously kept hidden beneath my tongue.
I had begun to openly challenge my father.
Chapter Seven
I was back at the hospital, standing at the doorway of the room, staring at the chair. It was where I’d left it, pressed against the wall beckoning me over. There was someone new in the bed next to Hy-Lo’s, a white man who didn’t look sick at all. His cheeks were rosy and his green eyes sparkled when I walked into the room. “Morning,” he said cheerfully in a Brooklyn accent I’d only heard in the movies. I just nodded and walked past him toward my chair.
“That your father?” he asked and leaned forward.
I sighed heavily. “Yes,” I muttered back at him and sat down.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“What’s wrong with you?” I shot back. The hostility in my voice was thick but did not seem to affect him.
He pulled at the sheet that covered his body; pulled it until it traveled up to his knees and all that was left below was the white bedsheet he lay on.
“Sugar,” he said and smiled. “I love Hershey bars,” he added and laughed.
I stared at the starched white sheet for a long time before I spoke. This time my voice was low and apologetic. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said and turned away.
“Uh-unh, don’t be, it’s my own fault, really. You get what you deserve, you know. They think they might have to take the rest of my right leg off. I guess they’ll just keep chopping away until I’m just a head!” He bellowed with laughter that was as buoyant as the ocean. There were no secrets there. No pain, disappointment, or regret—just joy.
No feet, no calves, and now the thighs were on their way out? Where was the joy in that? I thought that he had been placed in the D building in error. He should have been in the G building with the other lunatics.
“So now your turn: what’s wrong with your father?” he said after he wiped the tears of laughter away from his shining eyes.
“Everything,” I said and got up and pulled the curtain along its thin rod until it blocked out his face.
I pulled the chair from the wall and set it parallel to Hy-Lo’s toes. I shoved my hands into my pockets and stood staring at his drawn and ailing face. He would not last past Christmas. I could see it in the deep creases that crisscrossed his face like great chasms. He had sucked from the bottle and now the bottle was returning the deed.
I sat down and crossed my legs and arms. The wind howled frigid outside the window, but it was colder by his bedside than it was outside. I wrapped my arms around myself and watched as Hy-Lo’s cracked and peeling lips moved silently while he spoke to someone in his dreams. I watched him and recalled my own nightmares.
