“Hold on, son,” his father said and walked towards the jazz section. Octavian followed close behind his father, holding his record, while Bones went to help a customer carry a box of old records over to the table for Fred to assess their worth.
When Bones came back to the counter, Mina quickly crouched back down to the floor. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not gonna blow your cover.” He replenished the bumper sticker display next to the cash register and gave Mina a playful kick.
When they got to the register, Octavian picked up a bumper sticker. “Can I have one?” he asked Bones.
Mina shrunk closer to the floor and held her breath.
“Take as many as you like.” Bones said and put the Chuck Berry record in a bag. He held up the other. “This is a classic.”
“It’s for the boy,” Octavian’s father said.
“I thought I was getting Chuck Berry,” Octavian said.
“You are. But I’m also getting you Miles Davis’s +19. Got to start you off right.”
“I heard that,” Bones said.
“See you soon, Jimmy,” the father said.
“See you, Bones,” Octavian said.
“Have a wonderful day, my friends,” Bones said and gave a Mina another shove. Mina shoved him back. She heard the door open and close and stood up. Bones gave her the once-over. “You are weird,” he said.
Mina picked up one of the bumper stickers and put it in her pocket. “He used to be my friend.”
“Not no more?”
“We don’t go to the same school.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” Bones said. “Only cool-cool kids like Chuck Berry.”
The next day Mina wore her tapered jeans, a Prince concert t-shirt she’d convinced Bones to give her, and the silver painted boots. At lunch she sat down next to Clarissa and said, “What kind of music do you like?”
It was as if Mina had pulled the long cord for the light in a dark closet. Clarissa’s smile spread wide, “Me? What kind of music do I like?”
“Oh no,” Charles said. “Don’t ask her that question.”
The list was long and Mina lost track few minutes in, but Clarissa kept talking and then the whole table was talking because Latif didn’t think that Janet Jackson was better than Michael Jackson like Mercy did and Charles started singing “Pop Pop Pop Goes My Mind” after Clarissa told him he was a damn fool for thinking Luther Vandross was a member of Levertt.
Mina was almost forgotten until she said, “Well, I think Prince is better than all of them.”
Mercy shook her head and said, “No way, he’s too nasty for me.”
Charles closed his eyes and swayed back and forth and started to sing “Purple Rain.”
Clarissa reached over and put an arm around Mina. “I like Prince too,” she said. “I knew you were alright, Mina Rose.”
A week later, Kanta was gripping the steering wheel as she drove through North St. Louis. “I thought you said your friend Clarissa went to Wydown.”
“She does,” Mina said. “She rides the bus to school.”
They passed houses with boarded doors and graffiti scrawled across the sides. Behind broken fences, vacant lots sat scattered with abandoned shopping carts, washing machines and chunks of burned cars. Still, Mina saw that in some of those lots, vines of meandering morning glory ran wild, their indigo blooms perpetually happy, even when wound around such sadness.
“Are you sure this is where she lives?” Kanta asked again, and locked the already locked car door.
“I think so. We’ve been following the directions she gave me.” On the corner of Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, Mina said, “Turn right at the Harlem Tap Room and it should be at the end of this block.”
At the corner they passed a group of boys dressed in blue with bandanas hanging from their back pockets.
“There it is,” Mina said pointing. “See, there’s the pot of orange chrysanthemums on the steps like she said.” Mina dashed out and slammed the door behind her, leaving Kanta to drive away with words she didn’t know how to say stuck in her throat.
Mina followed Clarissa through the door and into the softly lit parlor, which had feathery alabaster wallpaper, past the younger twin brothers lying on the sofa playing Atari, and into the dining room, where papers covered a shiny black table.
“My mom just went back to college,” Clarissa said. “That’s her homework. Can you believe how much there is?”
They kept walking and Mina was about to say something about their history teacher Ms. Osborne, and how she gave too much homework, when Clarissa pushed through a heavy swinging door. Mina stopped short.
“What’s this?” Mina said.
“A kitchen?” Clarissa said. “Don’t you have one?”
“Not one like this,” said Mina.
The warm room smelled of boiled milk and butter. There was a wooden table in the middle with four chairs and an old porcelain sink in front of a window that looked out onto a tidy back yard. The refrigerator hummed in the corner and boasted photos, school announcements, and lunch menus. The floor of octagonal black-and-white tile was chipped but clean.
Next to where Mina stood was the stove and on it a heavy, dark green pot. Without thinking or asking, Mina lifted the lid and looked inside. It was full of spaghetti in thick meat sauce. For a brief, beguiling moment, Mina forgot where she was and, unable to help herself, she put her face over the pot and started taking in deep slow breaths of the hearty food, her lifetime of sprouted wheat and tofu vanishing with every inhale.
Clarissa’s mother Tracy walked into her kitchen and found the young, skinny white girl standing over her stove with her face in the pot of spaghetti and said, “What in the world?”
Clarissa, dumbfounded at her bizarre new friend, shrugged and smiled at her mother. “Mama,” she said, “this is Mina.”
TRACK 11
Tender Love
BY THE TIME MINA and Clarissa were in eighth grade, they were spending every weekend together. Usually they stayed at Clarissa’s house, but sometimes they had sleepovers at Mina’s where Mina taught Clarissa how to smoke cigarettes and they listened to her Prince records.
Every other weekend Clarissa went to her dad’s and Mina often went too. Douglas Moore lived down in Soulard on the South Side under the cover of the sour, hoppy fumes emitted night and day from nearby Anheuser Busch. Douglas spent most nights playing gigs with his Hendrix cover band in downtown bars, so he slept late on Saturdays. When Douglas woke up, he went to Soulard Market and came home with crusty loaves of bread, soft smelly cheeses, thick white jars of French orange marmalade, marinated artichokes, and spicy peppers and olives.
Douglas hipped Mina and Clarissa to Led Zeppelin, Santana, Brazil 66, and of course Jimi Hendrix, but by the time they were thirteen all Clarissa and Mina really wanted to listen to were slow jams. Every night they called each other at nine o’clock so they could turn on Magic 108 FM in time for the Quiet Storm. The show always started with the Smokey Robinson song of the same name and would be followed by Patti LaBelle, Rose Royce, Atlantic Star, Sade, Ready for the World, and Force M.D.’s.
Mina brought Clarissa to Rahsaan’s and introduced her to Bones before asking where they could find the Teddy Pendergrass tapes. Bones rolled his eyes and sucked his teeth. “You sure you want Teddy Pendergrass?”
They nodded.
“Do you girls know how many babies been made listenin’ to Teddy Pendergrass?”
Clarissa muffled a giggle behind her hand, but Mina gave him a hard glare. “Dang, Bones,” she said. “All this time you know I’ve been listening to Prince and now you want to be worried about Teddy Pendergrass?”
Bones gave her a long look that let her know he was worried no matter what she was listening to. He didn’t need to be. Except for the one time with Paul Glazer, Mina wasn’t doing any of the things that would even get her close to making a baby.
Paul Glazer and DeAndre Price lived around th
e corner from Clarissa and went to McKinley Middle. Close to the end of eighth grade, Clarissa and DeAndre started talking. One night, when Clarissa’s mom was in class and the twins were asleep, there was a quiet knock on the door. Clarissa jumped up and went to the window.
“What are you doing?” Mina asked.
“DeAndre’s here,” Clarissa said and let out a muted squeal. She put her eye against the peephole and turned around. “He’s with Paul,” she said, and clutched Mina’s hand.
The boys walked in slowly, as if even they were unsure of what was going on. They both wore Polo jeans and mock necks. Paul’s was white and DeAndre’s a dark green. Over his, Paul wore a thin, gold, herringbone chain.
The next thing Mina knew, she was sitting awkwardly on Clarissa’s living room floor watching Warriors while Clarissa and DeAndre sat on the couch and gave each other hushed, wet kisses.
“You got a blanket or something?” Paul said. It was the most he’d said since he walked in, and Mina went clumsily to Clarissa’s room to grab the afghan off her bed. On the way back, in the blinking light of the television, Mina saw that one of DeAndre’s hands was up Clarissa’s shirt. That her jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped.
Paul spread the afghan across his legs and then lifted it with a gentlemanly manner and motioned for Mina to get under. Mina, who had said even less than Paul, slid up against his warm body. He smelled like Bounce fabric softener and his legs stretched out beyond the blanket, revealing his bright white socks. Every few minutes he took out a wooden handled brush and smoothed down his waves.
Paul’s hand started on top of Mina’s knee. She shivered and moved herself closer to him as if she were suddenly cold instead of racingly hot. He moved his hand up her thigh and then down between her legs, rubbing her through the tough seam of her jeans. He turned and kissed Mina without saying a word, and his soft tongue tasted like peppermint taffy in her mouth.
Paul moved his hand up under her shirt. When he lifted her bra and ran his long fingers across the skin of her breasts that had only ever been touched by her own hands, she hoped he didn’t feel her tremble. When he went to unbutton and unzip Mina’s jeans, Mina glanced at Clarissa and DeAndre on the couch who were definitely not spending any time worrying about what Mina and Paul were doing. Still, Mina was grateful that the afghan covered them, especially when Paul took Mina’s now sweaty hand and pushed it into his unzipped jeans.
Mina held his heavy weight in her palm with no idea what to do. He was hot and hard, the skin smooth and loose, but before she could figure out what came next, they all heard the sound of a key turning in the lock of the front door. Furiously they scrambled to straighten their shirts, zip up pants, and wipe mouths. But it didn’t matter. Tracy walked in, took one look at them all and said, “Oh hell no.”
She put the boys out and told them she would be calling their mothers in the morning. She yanked Clarissa’s phone from the wall and removed the cable box from the living room TV. Then, even though it was after ten, Tracy cleared the dining room table, ordered the girls to sit down and told them they would write I will not be a fast, nasty girl until their eyes burned worse than their cheeks. Finally, she sent them to bed.
As she walked to Clarissa’s room, her hand aching, Mina saw Paul’s wooden brush lying half hidden under the couch and grabbed it. She and Clarissa lay in the dark and took turns pressing the bristles of the brush to their faces, smelling the masculine scent of Dax Wave and Groom. They talked about how strange, how strange and how good, it felt to have a boy’s fingers inside them.
2014
IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR, Riley’s head was bent abstractly over her phone. Her dark-brown hair fell in thick curls around her face and Mina noticed the deeply bitten fingernail of her thumb that expertly swiped across the screen. They spent Tuesday afternoons this way, parked outside a monotonous West Roxbury strip mall, waiting for Chloe to get out of dance class while Mina attempted and failed to start conversation.
The parking lot always reminded her of the one in South County, St. Louis, where she and Clarissa used to meet up with their pot dealer James, who looked like Nick Nolte and drove a Chrysler LeBaron. For a minute, Mina wondered if maybe Riley would have something to say if she told her about him.
But that felt too much like something Kanta would have said to her when Mina was fifteen, so instead she said, “Find anything good on there, Ri?”
“Well, if by good you mean like how fucking racist the city that you come from is, then I guess.”
Mina turned to tell her to watch her mouth, but stopped when she saw Riley’s accusing face. “You’re right,” she said.
“How’d you even come from there?” Riley asked.
“Pull up a map and I’ll show you,” Mina said.
Riley handed Mina the slim black phone with a map of St. Louis on the screen. Mina zoomed in until she saw street names she knew: Big Bend, Skinker, Clayton Road, Hanley, Washington Street, Olive, Delmar Boulevard. Looking at the familiar way the streets crossed and intersected, she again felt the longing she hadn’t been able to shake since Bones’ text a week before. Mina caught Riley’s waiting look in the review mirror. “Come up here,” she said.
“It’s Chloe’s week to sit in the front. You know how she’ll act if she comes out and I’m in her seat.”
Riley and Chloe fought about everything. About who had to do the dishes, about who got to choose the television show, but they fought most about who got to ride in the front seat. Mina, finally sick of listening to it, decreed that they’d have to rotate each week. This stopped the fighting but didn’t end the grumbling.
From the beginning, Mina found that her role as parent was basically reduced to referee. She couldn’t call herself a peacemaker, because there was never any actual peace, only neutral corners. She was most surprised at how much she had to check her own feelings, how she found herself siding with Riley more often than with Chloe. Riley looked nothing like Mina, with her deep-beige skin and her dark brown eyes, her curly hair, but Riley made more sense to Mina. She liked to read novels and watch episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and listened to the college radio station. And though Chloe’s face matched Mina’s like a reflection, with the same gray eyes, the same thin, straight hair and skin nearly as pale as Mina’s, Chloe confused Mina. She wanted Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirts and UGG boots and, paining Mina, insisted on listening to Taylor Swift.
“Come up here,” Mina said. “Don’t worry about Chloe.” Riley climbed over the seat and sat down, pushed up her glasses.
Mina wanted to wrap her arms around her daughter the way she used to when Riley was younger: back in the days when her father started forgetting to come up for his weekends, and stopped calling when he said he would, leaving Riley by the phone for a whole afternoon, missing playdates for nothing. Recently, Riley had stopped speaking to him altogether but, at the same time, she began to push her mother’s arm off her shoulders, to stand up the minute Mina sat down.
Mina looked down at where Riley had drawn all over her new Chuck Taylors. “You know when I was a kid I went through a phase where I was so into ska that I drew checkerboards all over my Converse?”
“Yeah, Mom. You’ve told me a hundred times,” Riley said, her eyes on her cell phone, which was now in Mina’s lap.
Mina picked up the phone. “This is U. City,” she said. “We lived here until I was about ten.” Mina zoomed in on the Parkview neighborhood and showed Riley the map.
“Why’d you move?”
“Well, Kanta said it was for my education, but it was really because most of the white people were moving out of U. City and she thought I wouldn’t get a good enough education if all the white kids were gone.”
“I can see Kanta doing something like that,” Riley said. Even as a grandmother, she was still Kanta. The girls would never think of calling her Grandma.
“It didn’t matter though,” Mina said. “I still hung out in U. City every day.”
“Did Auntie Clarissa live in U. City?”
“No, she lived over here,” Mina said, scooting the map to the North Side. “She was bussed into Clayton for school. But she hung out in U. City, too.”
Riley nodded.
Mina zoomed in on Delmar. “There’s Rahsaan’s,” she said pointing to the little icon. “And right here, around the block, was where my boyfriend Octavian lived.”
“Your boyfriend? As many times as you’ve told me about your stupid Converse, you never told me about any boyfriend.”
“Yeah, Ri,” Mina said and smiled. “Your mom had boyfriends once. You would have liked Octavian. He loved X-Men almost as much as you do.”
“Was he black?”
“Yeah.”
“Figures,” Riley said.
“Why do you say that?” Mina asked
“You’re one of those girls.”
“What do you mean I’m one of those girls?”
“Don’t be offended. It’s just who you are.”
Riley was good at pulling Mina up short. Like the time when she was in seventh grade and she’d been accepted to a gifted and talented camp at Boston College. They’d gotten to the dorm before Riley’s roommate, but when Mina saw the girl’s name, Debbie Chang, on the door next to Riley’s name, she’d breathed a sigh of relief.
“Good,” she said, “at least you’re not rooming with a white girl.”
Riley put her bag down on the bed and said, “Mom, why do you say things like that?”
“What? It’s true.”
“But you’re white,” Riley said.
“That’s why I know,” said Mina.
“So? What if I got a roommate like you?”
Mina looked at Riley now, still studying the streets of her hometown. It had been almost thirty years since second grade with Makeba, and here was her own brown-skinned daughter offering the same assessment.
“I know I’m not black, Riley,” she said.
Without looking up, Riley said, “Yeah, but sometimes you don’t think you’re white either. Why did you all hang out in U. City?”
There You Are Page 11