The House of Eve, page 5
I pointed to the homemade ice cream that sat in a clear display case.
“What flavors do you have?” It was a dumb question, because each canister was plainly labeled.
“Chocolate, butter pecan, vanilla, cherry vanilla and strawberry. My favorite is the cherry vanilla.”
I nodded toward the cherry vanilla, and he scraped the metal scooper against the creamy goodness.
“I’m just paying for one scoop.” I put up my hand, but he ignored me, and added a second helping to my bowl.
We were alone in the store. There were three silver barstools against the counter, but I didn’t move to sit. A jukebox with shiny metal castings, tubes of cellophane and bright colored lights sat under the window. I had spent very little time with white people growing up. Especially ones my age. There were the sisters that I had played with on Saturdays while Inez cleaned their house, but that was it. Aunt Marie would be fit to be tied if she found out about this foolishness. I was contemplating taking the ice cream to go, but then Shimmy interrupted my thoughts.
“What do you say?” He grinned expectantly.
I put my spoon to my lips and let the coldness dissolve on my tongue. “It’s good.”
“Just good?” He reached into the display and took some for himself.
“You gotta pay for that?”
“Nope, it’s one of the perks of working here.” He dipped his spoon and brought the ice cream to his lips. Some got caught in the crest of his mouth.
“You need a tissue.” I pointed.
He smirked. “You can have a seat.”
“I’m okay.”
“Ruby, relax, this is practically my place.” He gestured to the stool.
“You sure?” I looked around again, so unaccustomed to occupying white folks’ spaces.
“Mr. Greenwald is a nice guy.”
I hesitated and then slid onto the stool. Shimmy leaned across the counter and our silver bowls touched.
“Cheers,” he said, shoveling a big helping into his mouth. A faint mustache stretched across his top lip.
The bell chimed again, and I turned to see a pale lady dressed in a red felt hat enter the shop. Her dark eyes found me sitting at the counter and her thin nose turned up, like she was inhaling milk that had surprised her by going sour.
Shimmy straightened to a stand. “Afternoon. What can I get for you, Mrs. Levy?”
A long silence passed between them, and I didn’t know if I should get up or just leave, so I kept my face in my ice cream bowl. Not wanting to bring attention to myself, I didn’t even lift my spoon.
“I’ll have a half dozen chocolate turtles and a handful of licorice.” Her voice was careful and deliberate.
“Coming right up.” He moved to retrieve the treats.
“How’s your mother, Shimmy?” I could feel the woman shooting daggered looks my way. Beads of sweat broke down my neck.
“She’s fine.” He wrapped her chocolates in wax paper and then wrapped them again in white paper that he sealed with a red Greenwald’s label.
With her goods under her arm, the woman walked past me and stopped at the door, gawking unabashedly at my full bosom. I lifted my shoulders and lowered my head farther into my bowl.
“Be careful of the company you keep, Shimmy. They are a danger to good Jewish boys like you.” She huffed, sweeping the door closed behind her with a loud thud.
Shimmy slipped the money into the register.
“Sorry about that,” he offered, but I was already up out of my seat. The woman’s distaste for me had robbed me of my appetite. What was I doing here anyway? Besides making a fool of myself. I pushed my half-eaten bowl across the counter.
“Don’t go.” Shimmy reached out and grabbed my arm. His touch was both warm and clammy.
“This isn’t my world.” I snatched it away.
“Look, Mrs. Levy is just sore because her husband is cheating on her with the woman who works at the deli.”
I paused. “I just came from there. Which lady?”
“Alma, the one with the big mole on her chin.”
“She always looks so mad. I never let her serve me.”
“That’s because she wants him to get a divorce, but he refuses because they have two boys.”
“That’s a shame.”
“It’s all over the neighborhood, and her oldest son has been acting out in school.”
I shifted on my feet, feeling a bit of pity for the rude woman.
“Come on, let me play something for you on the jukebox. Sundays are slow and if you leave me alone, I’ll be forced to eat that whole barrel of ice cream.” His green eyes pleaded. I had never looked into eyes so clear, so bright with hope.
I sighed and made a show of sitting back down. He clapped his hands together, then strolled over to the jukebox in the corner.
“You work here every day?”
“Only Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays after school.”
“Must be nice to eat all the free sweets you want.”
“Definitely a plus. But I do have to be careful that all that sugar doesn’t ruin my figure.” He held up his arm and made a muscle. He was more string bean than potato, and the sight of his flexed arm set me into a fit of giggles.
“What, you disagree?” He lifted the other arm and made the same motion, and I chuckled even harder. “What song would keep that smile on your face?”
I felt myself blush. “Got any Nat King Cole?”
He dropped a coin in the slot, pressed the button and out came “A Blossom Fell.”
“That’s one of my favorites. How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.” He flashed his teeth.
The familiar music put me at ease, and we finished our ice cream. Our conversation flowed from the lyrics of our favorite songs, to what we hated about school, and landed on our weekly radio shows. We both agreed that The Fred Allen Show was our favorite and Shimmy cracked me up with his impersonations as he told joke after joke. The foot traffic into the store was slow. One man came in with five small kids, but he was so busy trying to please each with their favorite treat that he didn’t pay me much mind. Time seemed to drift away from us as Shimmy exhausted every song I knew on the jukebox, and then played a few of his favorites. When I said to him that I had better go, he asked me to stay a while longer.
Aunt Marie was sure to be looking for me by now, but I told him one last song. “Make this your finale.”
“I saved the best for last.” He pressed the button on the jukebox and out came “Rock and Roll” by Wild Bill Moore.
I only recognized the song because last weekend Fatty had brought home the 78 and played it nonstop while trying to teach me how to dance the jitterbug. I snapped my fingers to the beat, wiggling around in my seat.
“What do you know about this song?” I asked, because it had so much soul. “Are you trying to impress me?”
“Have I succeeded?” He tipped his chin.
“Just a little.” I moved my shoulders and hummed with the lyrics.
You can have my money, you can have my honey
but let me rock and roll.
Shimmy leaned forward, drumming his long fingers on the countertop. He was so near that our elbows touched and the smell of him made me heady.
“There’s something about that horn and the strong backbeat that makes me feel on top of the world.” He turned his face toward mine. There was a thin streak of ice cream under his bottom lip.
“I agree.” Without thinking, I licked the tip of my finger and wiped the streak away. Our eyes locked.
Just then, the shop door opened and in walked a graying man with a potbelly, wearing the same hat that Shimmy wore.
“Didn’t I tell you about playing those immoral records in here?” he said, chastising him. Then he saw me, and his eyes darkened like rain clouds. “No sitting allowed,” he roared.
I tripped over my own foot trying to stand up.
“Mr. Greenwald—” Shimmy mumbled, taking a step back.
“Shimmy, you should know better.”
Mr. Greenwald was a bear of a man, both tall and wide. He stood over me with his teeth clenched. Before he could say anything else, I rushed past him and out of the store. I knew what men like him were capable of. I read the newspaper and watched the news. It wasn’t until I made it halfway down the block that I realized my mistake. I had forgotten Aunt Marie’s packages. If I went home without her food, she’d have my head. I had no choice but to turn back.
An uneasy heat rippled down my back, and I paused at the door of the shop. As I was getting up the courage to go in, I heard Mr. Greenwald yelling.
“You can serve them quickly, but they can’t hang around and definitely can’t sit at my counter. You know that, boy. My old man must be rolling around in his grave.” He tsked through his teeth. “I received several calls of complaints.”
“She’s, she’s my friend,” Shimmy stammered.
“You can’t be friends with the likes of her. I thought you had more sense, boy. Don’t end up like your father.”
Mr. Greenwald paused when he heard the bell on the door and turned toward me with a smile. “Welcome to…” He stopped when he realized it was me, and his face furrowed. “You again?”
“I forgot my bag, sir.” I scooted into the store, avoiding Shimmy’s gaze, grabbed Aunt Marie’s shopping bag and went back out the door. I heard Mr. Greenwald lock the door behind me and then slap the closed sign on the window.
* * *
Church had let out and brown-faced families ambled in their Sunday best, heading home for lunch before afternoon service. I trudged up 31st Street with Aunt Marie’s purchases, trying to stomp off Mr. Greenwald’s comments and the image of his snarl. I was a paying customer, and he did not have to treat me like dirty chewing gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe. It wasn’t like I didn’t know that white people hated us. It was a fact of life. Everybody I knew lived in cramped, drafty apartments and paid rent to white folks who did little to make the place livable. The adults I knew worked low-level jobs for white people who paid them too little for too much work. Fatty cleaned offices, my mother did day’s work for families who couldn’t afford a full-time maid and Nene used to take in laundry and cook to make ends meet.
Their lives were my window, and I knew from an early age that cleaning up after white folks wasn’t the path for me. I was going to be an optometrist so that I could discover the cure to fix Nene’s glaucoma and bring back her sight. I would be the first in our family to go to college, and when I came home with my various degrees, it would serve as proof that my father’s family had been wrong about me. And that Inez had been wrong about me, too.
Aunt Marie told me that when Inez had confessed to being pregnant at the tender age of fifteen, Nene cried and then slapped Inez across the face, saying, “I’m glad your father already went to be with the Lord, otherwise you’d drive him right up to the pearly gates yourself.”
Once Nene calmed down and came to grips with reality, there was only one thing for her to do. Insist that the boy do his honorable duty. Junior Banks was a good-looking young man, and his parents owned Bankses’ funeral home. They lived on the corner of 16th and York, in a row house with a wide front porch.
“At least you haven’t disgraced yourself with a common little nigga,” Nene had said—Aunt Marie had shared the whole story with me last summer over a game of cards and a few too many glasses of home-brewed hooch.
When my father’s mother, Mrs. Banks, opened the door, she didn’t even invite Nene and Inez in for tea. She just stood there, holding her storm door closed like she didn’t want them to see all the finery inside her house. Like they might try to steal something.
According to Aunt Marie, after Nene had cleared her throat and delivered the news, Mrs. Banks took one look at Inez, in her well-worn coat and wide-brimmed hat that made her look more like a sharecropper than a respectable young girl, and laughed in her face.
“There ain’t no way that Junior would lick his chops at the sight of you. Go find some other fool to claim your bastard.” Mrs. Banks was apparently still cackling when she closed her door.
Inez holed up in their apartment while Nene tried to figure out their next move. Aunt Marie told me that she was the one who went back a few days later and banged on the Bankses’ door, with the intention of knocking some sense into whoever answered. It was Mr. Banks who stood in the doorframe, informing her that Junior lived in Baltimore now and couldn’t possibly be the father.
He handed Aunt Marie a small envelope, “for your troubles.” And then he closed the door.
Inside was enough money to cover two months’ rent, and the matter was dropped. Six months after I was born, word traveled that Junior Banks had proposed marriage to a respectable woman.
I knew where the Banks lived, and I walked by their house on occasion, just to look at the well-kept porch with the hanging potted plants. When I earned my degree and became a doctor, I pictured that they would be down on their knees begging my forgiveness for abandoning me. They would see that I was good enough. Smart enough. Worthy of the last name, Banks, that they made sure Inez did not include on my birth certificate.
I was determined to prove myself, to give Nene her eyesight back—and to never have to depend on a man to keep a roof over my head like Inez. That’s why I worked so hard in the We Rise program and had to secure that full scholarship. Falling short was not an option, and this new friendship with Shimmy was a distraction that I couldn’t afford. I had to put him and those magnetic green eyes out of my mind. It wasn’t like I needed Mr. Greenwald or the rude woman to point out that Shimmy and I were not intended to mix. It was something I was born knowing.
For the next few days I kept my head in my schoolwork, and Shimmy brushing yellow on my painting and playing Wild Bill on the jukebox far from my mind. Then on the following Friday, I was sitting on Aunt Marie’s front steps when I looked up to see Shimmy emerging from the paint store on the corner, his hair falling over one eye, the other one fastened on me.
Without thinking, my hand reached up to touch my bangs, to make sure the wind had not blown them out of place. Open in my lap was a paperback copy of Twelfth Night, an assignment for my advanced English class at school. From the corner of my eye, I saw Shimmy slip closer. He was walking next to an older man who was favoring his left knee.
“Pop, I’ll wait for you out here.”
“I won’t be long,” said the man, looking straight ahead at the front door of the building. His face was shiny, his grip on the banister clumsy, and I caught a whiff of hard liquor seeping from his skin. I had seen him before, but hadn’t known he was Shimmy’s father. He was Aunt Marie’s landlord, and he came by to collect the rent money. The man had a reputation for being a drunk, and spent time up in Mr. Leroy’s apartment on the top floor drinking, sometimes until he passed out. Even in his liquored fog he was still a stickler for his money. He didn’t trust his tenants to pay at the end of each month, so he collected his money weekly.
Shimmy stood a few feet from the iron railing.
“Hi.”
I didn’t look up from my book, even though I could no longer make sense of the words on the page.
“Whatcha reading?”
I held up the cover. Willing him with my mind to go.
“I read that last year. Decent for Shakespeare.”
Then I couldn’t help myself. “Which of his is your favorite?”
“Probably Romeo and Juliet.”
“Why?”
“I’m a sucker for a forbidden love story.” He swept his hair out of his eye and smiled.
My face betrayed my resolve by breaking into a grin. “I’d never peg you as a hopeless romantic.”
“Mind if I sit?”
I looked up the street to see who was watching. Two boys played kick the can, and a black dog sniffed the trash cans looking for food. Ms. Edna’s second-floor window was open, but just because I didn’t see her, that didn’t mean she wasn’t lurking. On this block someone was always paying attention.
“It’s not a good idea.”
He lowered himself onto the step two spots below me and peered up at me through his lashes. They were long and full and a shame to waste on a boy who already had so many good features.
“I don’t want you to get into any more trouble.” I turned my face toward the sky.
“Sorry about Mr. Greenwald. I didn’t know he’d act like that.”
“I shouldn’t have expected anything more.”
A blush crept up his neck and bloomed in his cheeks. “Of course you should have. Let me make it up to you.”
I pressed my lips together, searching for a hint of the Chap Stick I had applied earlier, but it had dried up.
“Just forget it, please.”
Shimmy reached into his pocket and held out a tube of lavender paint to me. “Now you can add a few flowers to the tree in your painting.”
No boy had ever brought me a gift before. They took things from me, though. Brushed up against my behind in the hall at school, looked up underneath my skirt on the stairs, always with their hands out trying to get a free feel when adults weren’t looking in the schoolyard. And then there was Leap, and the men on the street. Shimmy was so different.
“Thank you. This means a lot.”
“Come listen to some music with me tomorrow night at the Dell.” His voice was hoarse.
“Are you crazy? Deaf or dumb?” I blew out a laugh, while flipping the tube of paint over in my hand. It was the good kind that would dry fast.
“I’m serious.”
“How are we supposed to get away with that? I can’t even come in your candy store without being thrown out like the evening trash.”
He put his hands together. “Let me show you. I’ll meet you right here at eight.”
His eyes bored into me for so long I had to look away. What I should have said was absolutely not, but before I could stop myself, I whispered, “What if someone sees us?”
“I’ll have my father’s car.” He ventured up a step closer to me. His cedar scent made it impossible for me to think straight.
“Shimmy, you don’t owe me anything. The ice cream was nice but—”
