by Lenzo, Lisa;
The market is active with people shopping, yet not crowded. Rosie doesn’t stop for a cart but wheels Ralph straight to the toilet paper aisle, which is where this store keeps the adult diapers. Rosie lifts a square package of the correct briefs, which are bulky yet light, and Ralph accepts them onto his lap.
Retracing their path up the paper goods aisle, they pass a teenaged girl with braided and beaded hair wearing a sweatshirt on which is stamped in huge letters: CALL YOUR MOTHER. It reminds Rosie of the shirt on which her daughter Annie embroidered LOVE YOUR MOTHER in a semicircle around an image of the lovely green and blue Earth as seen from outer space. Thinking of that shirt reminds Rosie of how her and Ralph’s world has shrunk. Currently, it includes only a couple square miles of Detroit. Soon it will likely shrink to within the walls of their apartment. She misses the things they used to enjoy—dinners out, ball games, concerts, plays. And trips across the country to visit their kids. But she doesn’t want to go anywhere if Ralph can’t go with her. Their goal now is to stay at home, for Ralph to live out the rest of his life in their apartment. They should be able to make that happen as long as Ralph doesn’t hit his head or break a bone and wind up in the hospital. Or if his mind doesn’t deteriorate to the point where she can no longer keep him safe.
Rosie chooses the shortest and, she hopes, the fastest checkout line, stopping behind a black man in his sixties with a pencil mustache. The man’s hands rest on his cart, inside which is a green pepper, several cans of pinto beans, a package of sausages, a bottle of red wine, and a carton of grapefruit juice. The mustachioed man is dressed in tasteful, casual clothes in muted browns and grays, set off by a jazzy pink shirt. Standing ahead of him is a very tall, very dark-skinned man in his forties wearing a light blue dress shirt and a lavender tie. He is holding a can of tuna in one hand and his wallet in the other. Rosie is relieved when the cashier places the can inside a grocery bag. Now, after the man leaves the store, no one will see the tuna can glinting in his hand and possibly mistake it for a gun and shoot him.
When it’s her turn, Rosie pays with cash. On the way out, she stops at the ATM and withdraws another two hundred dollars, since sometimes the machine in their building is out of order. With Ralph holding the big square bag of diapers on his lap, she wheels him out of the store, past the stone-faced security guard, who does not meet her eyes, and down the long stretch of sidewalk that borders the parking lot, stopping only once to pull Ralph up straighter.
It is night now—it gets dark so early, so quickly, this time of year! Beyond the parking lot, the sidewalk is less well lit, but all of the streetlights are working and Rosie can even make out the shadowy shapes of the trees in the park across the street where she and Ralph sometimes go for a stroll in the daytime.
She is wheeling Ralph across the street, using the crosswalk that young children use in the daytime for school, when she sees, off to the left, a group of four boys or young men in the distance, heading their way. The four don’t veer into the park, but stay on the bordering sidewalk that will lead them to her and Ralph. They are swaggering, not in a threatening way, but as young men or teenagers tend to do, just as they swaggered down the halls at Mumford High.
Rosie had liked to say, when people asked if Mumford was all black, “No. We have one Indian boy.” After the Indian boy graduated, the school was one hundred percent black, not counting the teachers, about a third of whom were white. Eddie Murphy had graduated from Mumford, and also Susan from Sesame Street. It was a middle-class school, and most of the kids were well behaved. But still, there was violence, at times fatal. One of Rosie’s former students was killed the summer before she was to start college. She’d gone with her boyfriend to a house in her neighborhood, where they’d been told there was a party. But it turned out to be the wrong house. Inside was a drug dealer who didn’t recognize the young couple on his steps, and he answered their knock with gunfire. The girl died right there, on the front porch. A bright and cheerful student, accepted to U of M, a future teacher, perhaps, maybe also a wife and mother someday.
Rosie pushes Ralph and his chair over the rough, slanted sidewalk. It is fully night now. But that doesn’t mean they are in danger, even with four black teenaged boys walking behind them, who will certainly catch up to them, since she and Ralph can’t help but move slowly. She shouldn’t be afraid. The boys have as much right to be outside now as she and Ralph, and likely as much purpose. They could be walking to Greektown for pizza, or maybe just rambling around, like young people do. But she is afraid, and she feels bad for being more afraid than she would be if the boys behind her were white. She remembers a comedian she and Ralph saw twenty or more years ago at a comedy club on Jefferson, a few blocks from here. A young, black comedian with a round, expressive face, he told about how he was walking down the street one night when a car with two white couples pulled up and stopped at the red light, and how he heard thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk—four door locks being pushed down. The comedian had looked all around him on the stage, mimicking his fright on that night: where is the danger these white people have seen that he hasn’t yet? He approaches the car, calling out, “Where is it? Where’s the bad guy, where’s the monster? Let me in the car with you! Don’t leave me out here to get killed!” And then, seeing the fear in their eyes increase as they stare goggle-eyed at him, he realizes what they are so frightened of: “Oh—it’s me. They’re locking their doors against me.” She and Ralph had laughed helplessly along with the rest of the audience, which was integrated.
Integrated—you never hear that word anymore; it died with Martin Luther King. She remembers the young Freedom Riders from Mississippi who stayed at their house when they rode the buses north to Detroit. She remembers Ralph leaving her and the kids for five days to march from Selma to Montgomery, and before that, she and Ralph and the kids going to hear Dr. King’s first “I Have a Dream” speech, right here in Detroit, walking from First Unitarian Church to downtown, pushing Danny, who was then their youngest, in his stroller. She was pregnant with Zachary, but she didn’t know it yet. Now Zacky is fifty-one, or is he fifty-two? She is doing the math when Ralph’s wheelchair lurches—she’s hit a bump in the dark—and he slides from his chair to the concrete.
“Oh, Ralphy!” she cries. “I’m so sorry—are you okay?”
Ralph lets out a soft stream of curses. Rosie locks the wheelchair’s brakes and bends over him. He is lying on his back inside his slippery down coat, his large eyes open. “I’m fine,” he says calmly. “I didn’t fall hard.”
Rosie laughs with relief. “You are getting to be an expert at falling!” she teases. But she immediately sobers. How is she going to get him back up into his chair? But she already knows—she will have to ask the four teenagers for help. She glances behind her. They are less than half a block away, walking slowly toward them. One is wearing a hooded sweatshirt, one a down parka, and two have on only light jackets. As they draw closer, Rosie sees that one of the jacketed boys is walking a dog, a muscular brown dog with short hair and a snub nose, of that breed used for fighting.
Rosie draws in her breath. Ralph is lying on the ground like a piece of meat, like the dead deer they saw years ago at the edge of the woods on Belle Isle. She will kick the dog with all her might if it advances toward Ralph.
The four boys draw to a stop, less than fifteen feet off. They are the age of the boys she used to teach, boys who thought they were men. They had wanted to be called men, and Rosie had obliged them, aware that black men of all ages have long been called “boy” as an insult, and that children of all colors want to seem older than they are. But in her head, she still thought of her teenaged students as children. And now that she’s past eighty, these four boys look younger than ever.
The boys are speaking to one another. Then they all laugh. Rosie thinks she hears derision in their tone. “Can you please help me lift my husband back onto his chair?” she calls, raising her voice over theirs, as she had done many times from the front of her classroom. “I hit
a bump in the sidewalk and he slid out onto the ground.” She thinks of what they must look like—two old, frail, white-haired white people on a broken sidewalk by a deserted park in downtown Detroit, one lying on his back, the other standing helplessly over him.
The boys shuffle closer. “Johnny!” Ralph calls, looking up.
A couple of the boys laugh again, and Rosie is afraid she hears an unkind note in their laughter. “Name’s not Johnny, it’s Lenny,” the closest one says. He is bareheaded and tall, wearing a gold-colored windbreaker.
“Sorry I missed your funeral,” Ralph says, and some of the boys laugh again. Ralph is not looking at Lenny, Rosie knows, but beyond him, at the sky.
At least one of the boys figures this out, too: “Old motherfucker seeing ghosts,” the one wearing the parka says.
“Man, watch your motherfucking language,” the boy holding the dog says. The dog whines and strains forward, toward Ralph. Rosie mentally readies herself to step between Ralph and the dog, Ralph and the boys. The boy jerks the dog’s chain back hard, and the dog makes a choking, coughing sound like Ralph does when food gets caught in his throat, and sits back on its haunches.
But Ralph is oblivious—to the dog, to the boys, even to her. “Wanna play ball?” he asks, looking over Lenny’s shoulder.
“With you, Gramps?” the boy in the hooded sweatshirt says. “You got a hoop in your yard?” More laughter travels among them.
“We gonna go one-on-one?” the boy wearing the parka says. “Or are you gonna take us all at once?”
“We can play for whatever you got in your wallet,” the hooded boy says, and Rosie isn’t sure if he is entirely joking. The lettering on the front of his sweatshirt is so faded and stripped off that Rosie wouldn’t be able to read it even if the light were better. She will step between these boys and Ralph if they take one more swaggering step forward. She’d done it before, in her classroom—she’d stepped between boys facing off for a fight at least a half dozen times. She’d even stepped between two of them once after they’d thrown the first punches. Astonished, they had paused, and she had taken advantage of their surprise to speak. “I do not allow fighting in my classroom,” she had said. The taller of those boys had looked down at her and said, “Lady, you must be crazy.” But he’d turned away and walked out of her classroom, and she’d picked up a piece of chalk and resumed writing equations on the board.
Some of the children in that class would go on to hold down good factory jobs or become teachers, musicians, doctors, or engineers. Others would work in low-wage service jobs or be chronically unemployed. They would go to prison or die young. They would become drug addicts and dope pushers, alcoholics and other sorts of beaten-down men and women.
She looks at these four boys standing before her and over Ralph, unable to think of what to say to them, and feels a terrible dread. She will gladly give them her whole money-packed little purse to save Ralph. But what if money isn’t enough? She doesn’t know what she will do if she is robbed of the last months or years of Ralph’s life. Suddenly she feels like a widow—she sees that empty space waiting for her, just up ahead. She feels like she did when Zachary was a toddler and he went missing for an hour and she feared he was dead. She feels like she did after Danny, at nineteen, fell into the cardboard box crusher at work, and the doctor slapped X-rays of his legs up on a lighted screen and said he would lose one leg for sure and probably both.
“God damn it, don’t swing so hard!” Ralph says. He is still stretched out on his back and looking up at the sky. “Give it a good smack, don’t club it to death!”
The boys laugh again. Rosie looks first at Lenny, then at the hooded boy. “My husband is seriously ill,” she says, trying to keep her voice from quavering. “Can you please help him up? If it were your grandfather . . .”
The two boys exchange glances. Then Lenny gives a command, and all four of them surge forward. Rosie can’t seem to step toward Ralph or lift a hand. The boys and the dog are all tangled up with Ralph, while she stands helplessly watching.
Ralph rises from their midst, jerkily but swiftly, and then he is in his chair again, upright and seemingly unharmed, with the four boys standing around him. The hooded boy is looking off toward the street, and the boy holding the leash has his head bent toward his dog. The boy in the parka nudges the broken sidewalk with his shoe. Lenny, whose gaze is flitting, flashes Rosie a slight smile.
Rosie is struck silent. Then Ralph calls her name.
She steps closer to him and asks, “What is it, Ralph?”
Ralph is gazing up from his wheelchair and swiveling his head, what little he can, trying to take in all four of the boys. “Why are all these people standing around?” he asks.
“They saw you fall out of your chair,” Rosie explains, “and they helped you back up.”
“They did?” Ralph says. He looks at the boys and sighs. “Thank you. Very much.”
“That’s all right,” Lenny says. He pulls at the sleeves of his gold windbreaker, straightening the cuffs over his wrists. Then he asks, “What are y’all doing out here at night?”
Rosie remembers the diapers. “Oh,” she says. “My husband’s briefs . . . we came from the store . . . he dropped them when he fell.”
“Briefs?” Lenny asks, his quick face puzzled.
“Diapers for adults,” Rosie says. She looks around until she spots the pale package, off to the side on the grass.
Lenny turns to the other boys and says something.
“I ain’t carrying no old dude diapers,” the boy in the parka grumbles. But the hooded boy steps over to the bag of briefs, snatches it up, and carries it to Rosie.
Rosie thanks him and sets the bag on Ralph’s lap. Then she looks from the sweatshirted boy to Lenny. “You’ve already helped us enormously,” she says. “But . . . do you think . . . could you please . . . walk us back to our apartment? I’m afraid my husband will slip out of his chair again.”
Lenny squints as if surprised. Then he asks, “Where y’all live?”
“Right down this street,” Rosie says. “In that tall building past the park.”
Lenny glances around at his friends. The sweatshirted boy shrugs. The boy holding the dog seems to nod. Lenny steps closer, to one side of Ralph’s chair.
They start walking, Lenny on one side of Ralph and the boy with the dog on his other, Rosie pushing Ralph’s chair, the other boys lagging behind. Lenny is holding onto Ralph’s coat at his shoulder and saying something to Ralph about his brother—he was shot in the spine a year ago, Lenny says; he has to use a wheelchair to get around.
Rosie wonders if Ralph will mention their son Danny, in his fifties now, who has used a wheelchair ever since he lost his legs at nineteen, who has grown so swift and graceful in his chair that he plays basketball and even dances. But Ralph does not.
Ralph says to Lenny, “I’m so sorry about your brother,” and Rosie glances up at the sky, where Ralph has seen his own brother this evening. She doesn’t expect to see Johnny’s ghost up there, and she doesn’t, not even a trace. Yet it seems as if the sky overhead has grown deeper, and that the ground under her feet has expanded and is still spreading outward, connecting her to the rest of the Earth. In her mind, she sees what looks like light flowing over the ground through the city, and then traveling out over the rest of the country, following the arc of the Earth. She sees this bright current joining her to the world. Then her thoughts return to Ralph and the four boys and the dog, who is panting in the quiet and measuredly setting his feet—Rosie hears his nails clicking and scraping on the sidewalk.
Rosie continues to step, pushing Ralph. Lenny adjusts his grip on Ralph’s coat to keep him from slipping, and Rosie leans her head over Ralph’s other shoulder. “Ralphy, how are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m all right, Rosie,” Ralph says.
Rosie smells the soap she used to shave Ralph this morning. She feels heat rising from the neck of his coat. All through the years, she has loved being near his warmth
. She looks up at the darkened sky, hoping they will manage and even savor whatever time Ralph has left, and as she does her gaze is caught by the moon: a bright sliver, thin as the edge of a fingernail, curving around a dark globe that’s almost lost in the surrounding blackness. She leans in again toward Ralph. “I don’t know if you can see it,” she says, “but there’s a crescent moon up ahead. Above the buildings.”
Ralph shifts his head backward, and his large eyes turn upward.
The boy walking the dog points with his free hand. “It’s right up there,” he says.
Ralph stares, unblinking, into the night sky. “I can see it,” he says. “So delicate.”
“Look how the clouds are moving across it,” Rosie says. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”
Marching
The train rocks and sways, taking me home to Detroit. We race along the edges of harvested fields, snow flying up from the tracks and creating a fine, white blur. We skirt small cities, the backsides of towns and people’s backyards. We pass water towers, a power plant, graffiti on bridges in Battle Creek. Then we’re in the countryside again, and I’m staring out at monotonous fields and bare scrub when a small scene grips my heart: a creek winding through a clearing enclosed by a stand of snow-covered trees. It’s unassuming yet lovely, and even after the train has rattled past, I’m enthralled as well as saddened by that fleeting moment of beauty.
My sister picks me up at the train station, drives me downtown, and hugs me good-bye at the apartment entrance—she doesn’t have time to come up. Laura, the doorwoman who lets me in, asks if Nichole is my sister and if she is the baby of the family. Yes and yes, I say. Nichole, eighteen years younger than I am, is the daughter of my father’s ex-mistress. Our dad revealed and then introduced Nichole to our mom when Nicki was two, and then to my four brothers and me when Nicki was six. My dad’s affair caused my parents a lot of strife, but since then—for the past thirty-seven years—their marriage has been loving and strong, and Nichole has become so much a part of our family that, like the rest of us kids, she calls our mother “Mom.”