The Importance of Being Dangerous

by David Dante Troutt

  “I know too,” she smiled.

  So Sidarra was able to leave them over McDonald’s Happy Meals. She said she just wanted to go back to a window and look at a bag she passed. There was in fact more than one bag. Sidarra’s alias bought three, but Sidarra was the one who had to carry them back to McDonald’s. And she’d have to come up with an explanatory lie for Michael.

  “Can I have this delivered?” she asked the Fendi cashier.

  “Of course. Would you like it gift-wrapped as well?”

  Pleased with her own quick thinking, Sidarra grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, why don’t we do that?” She promptly had the bags sent to her job at the Board of Miseducation. Then she went back to another couple of stores and did the same thing. When she returned to Michael and Sidarra, she was empty-handed; they were fat, full of French fries, and giggling hard. After an hour or so of family shopping, she dropped them again in the kiddie arcade and ran off to pick up a couple of outfits at Chanel. Fourteen quarters of video games later and Sidarra was back with them, not a bag in sight.

  The alias could be a strange thing for the old Sidarra, a quiet shopping companion who never said no to the costumes of confidence the new Sidarra wore all the time now. It had become a habit she could now afford to break. If she wanted to come back to the Short Hills Mall, her alias would have to stay home next time. And Sidarra wanted to come back—even if she had to drive herself. She wanted to be the same woman out in the world that she was in the lounge at the Full Count. She also wanted Raquel to see her mother handle her business without having to hide her fear that somebody with a badge might someday tap her on the shoulder. This way of life could not become a way for life, she thought, as they walked toward a Nine West shoe store. It couldn’t last forever.

  “Hey, Mommy, wanna pretend we’re poor?” Raquel said loud enough for half the people in the store to turn around.

  “That’s not funny,” Sidarra snapped in a sharp whisper.

  “What?” Raquel wondered loudly. Fortunately, Michael didn’t do women’s shoes and stayed outside with the latte they hoped would keep him and the fun going longer.

  “Lower your voice, Raquel, and stop playing!” Sidarra stared firmly into her daughter’s eyes, but Raquel just looked confused. “When I whisper to you, you don’t keep talking loudly, okay?” Raquel nodded sheepishly. “Now, we’re not playing that game anymore.”

  Raquel was obviously embarrassed. She glanced around at the strange people from New Jersey looking at her so curiously, and she obediently sat down to make herself disappear. She didn’t know what her mother was so mad about. They were in a shoe store. Didn’t she remember the game? For her part, Sidarra paid more attention to the scene they made than to Raquel. She smiled one of those you-know-kids smiles to whoever would take it and pretended to take great interest in a pair of burgundy boots. Raquel withdrew. When Sidarra pointed out that they happened to have a small children’s shoe section, Raquel politely shook her head and went back to waving her legs under the bench.

  “Well, sweetie, how ’bout you help Mommy pick out something?”

  Raquel shrugged. This was quiet resistance, a late-blooming insolence Sidarra figured Raquel must have picked up in private school. To things she once got excited about doing, she now showed indifference. It was a tough tactic.

  “Hey, Raquel. If these boots were a new car, what color should they be?”

  That did it. Eyes widened. Interest returned. And the two embarked on a short search for sensible shoes. When Michael appeared in the doorway, a man-sized presence reeking of coffee, they knew it was time to go.

  At the cashier, Sidarra reached in her purse for her alias. Raquel’s face was unusually close, and she watched her mother fiddle for her wallet. Her scrutiny threw Sidarra off. Maybe it was the Payless ShoeSource episode coming back to mind, and she wasn’t convinced that their poverty was past. Maybe it was the fear of going to jail in New Jersey where her New York friends would never be able to find her again. Whatever it was, Sidarra couldn’t bring herself to pay with the alias. There were boxes of shoes on the counter, four for Sidarra and one for Raquel.

  “They’re all comfortable. How much is enough, baby?” she asked Raquel. “Two is probably just enough,” she declared, and told the cashier she would not be needing the other two pairs today. With a little more confidence, Sidarra pulled a few fifty-dollar bills from her wallet and handed them to Raquel. “Handle your business, child.”

  Raquel beamed and took the bills from her mother’s hand. “Okay!”

  IT WAS EASIER FOR SIDARRA to buy the Mercedes-Benz her father never owned than it was to explain to her daughter why they weren’t playing poor anymore. In fact, Sidarra could do most of the transaction over the phone, and they delivered her sky blue sedan to the brownstone a few days later. It was amazing how few questions got asked with the right size down payment. The municipal credit union was more than happy to finance the rest, and given Sidarra’s new and improved credit rating, at a rate even Michael would call ridiculous. Except that Michael didn’t get to call it anything. He got left out of the Mercedes loop on account of his demonstrated tendency to interfere with her happiness. It wasn’t just the constant attraction to Griff; Michael couldn’t keep pace with her. He couldn’t follow her money. She kept having to look back over her shoulder for him. Michael was also kept from knowing what Sidarra was fast discovering about having money: every purchase is easier. People who present themselves as having money get breaks, discounts, and a friendlier path than folks who look hard-up. You pay twice for being hard-up. And you wait a lot. Sidarra couldn’t have waited for that car if she’d wanted to. It arrived just in time for her to drive herself to work, inconspicuously retrieve her Short Hills “presents” from the mailroom, and drive them home again. Of course she knew how to drive. But as Raquel was too eager to point out, she just drove slowly.

  “How’d you do it?” Aunt Chickie asked from her seat in the corner of the living room sofa. “You had got so fat, Sidarra.”

  Sidarra kept trying on the new clothes. Tonight was the first night they’d ever used the fireplace without the whole house smoking up by accident. It was also a good time to try on her new clothes. At the dining room table down at the other end of the floor, Raquel crouched over her homework and hardly moved. “I was depressed.”

  “For four, five years?”

  Sidarra, wearing only her bra on top and a skirt, turned for a second, shot Aunt Chickie a look, and went back to adjusting a skirt. “There’s a time limit? I don’t think so. It started before I lost them and got much worse afterward. I’m doin’ the best I can. That’s all I can do.”

  “I’m not criticizing. I’m just remembering. Look at you now, girl. That skin allergy you complained about looks almost gone to me.”

  “Almost. Thanks for noticing.”

  “Your figure,” Aunt Chickie continued, “that’s what you call svelte. I didn’t wanna say nothing at the time, but, Lord, Sidarra, you were fat.” She finally pressed the on button on the remote control she had been holding. The large-screen TV popped on, but it was still too far away for her old eyes to see well. She squinted and sat a little forward on the couch, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. “You’re taking care of your own self. The only way to go. The only one.”

  “Got that right.”

  “That one’s very nice, Sidarra. Very elegant,” she pointed to the blouse. Firelight from the artificial log glowed on their brown skin.

  “Yeah, I like it too.”

  “So you ain’t ever gonna marry that Michael fella then?”

  Raquel immediately put down her pencil and listened in. When she wasn’t sure if she could hear over the TV, she got up and tiptoed closer to the wide doorway. Sidarra caught her in the corner of her eye.

  “Baby, you should finish your homework upstairs in your room,” Sidarra said. “Aunt Chickie’s watching television now, and you need to concentrate.”

  “I’m just about finished.”
<
br />   “Well, go on up and finish, child,” Aunt Chickie added. “We’ll be here when you get it all done correctly.”

  They waited for her to gather her books and papers and head up the stairs.

  “That’s sort of the question, isn’t it? But I’m pretty sure I’ve known the answer for a while now, Chickie. Michael’s a good man. He’s kind and he tries to look out for me.” She stopped talking, walked quietly to the foot of the stairs in her stocking feet, and looked straight up into her daughter’s eyes. “What’s the matter? You got a water bug in your room, young lady?”

  Busted, Raquel just nodded yes, went to her room and shut the door.

  Sidarra pointed upstairs and whispered, “If anything, she’s the reason Michael’s still around. They really get along.” Sidarra pulled some fishnet stockings out of a bag, looked at her aunt, and decided to put them back.

  “Please do me a favor, Sidarra, and don’t waste your precious time on perfection,” Aunt Chickie said. “That’s why I’m living downstairs and not in some fine suburban house. No offense.”

  Sidarra looked surprised. “I always thought it was love. I always kind of admired that about you, you know? That you’d fallen in love, been in love, and when you lost that love, you were gonna keep holding out for love.”

  “Same thing. But it was quite different then. I look at y’all nowadays and I’m afraid it’s hard to see how any of you ever fall in love. I’m not so sure you all know what being in love is, so concerned about, what is it, ‘making bank’?”

  Sidarra finished tying her robe and sat down to face the fire. “Well, I’m in love,” she told the flames.

  “That’s nice,” Aunt Chickie smiled softly.

  “It’s taken me a while to realize it. It’s not a perfect situation. But he’s as much perfection as I care to know.”

  Aunt Chickie grew attentive. “Does he love you back?”

  “Think so.”

  “Who is it?”

  “The man at the party. Griff.”

  “I knew it!” She mashed her fist on her knee. “Yup. That’s a problem. Wish I had some advice.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll work it out.”

  Aunt Chickie’s eyes returned to the silent TV screen, but the expression on her face looked irritated. After a long pause, she opened her mouth to speak. “I’m just wondering something, Sidarra.” Sidarra stopped what she was doing. “Assuming you could, what makes it okay to take this man from that woman?”

  Sidarra thought for a moment and looked up at her aunt. “I deserve him,” she said.

  “Well, you’re not the first,” she sighed. “Just be careful, Sidarra, would you? People have a way of thinking the only vows to take serious are their own.”

  MEANWHILE, IN HIS ROOM surrounded by the crusts of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Yakoob confronted Fidelity Investments’ firewall for the first time as a customer. It was not just that he truly wanted to go back and get Heidi’s real name (Marissa Arpel). It was that, after many days of dedicated attempts, he couldn’t hack past the firewall. It surprised him that he couldn’t quite put himself in the mind of the bank’s programmers. Yakoob had always been able to find the field that revealed the code that opened the database where the good numbers lived. But this couldn’t be unveiled without a password. At least not in the time he had.

  So several weeks after his successive Whiteboy runs of the Amistad, Koob found himself back at the Fidelity reception desk, his new account application filled out, sitting at George Cavanaugh’s desk, angrily biting down on his own jaw. This time he carried just $1,000 in money orders, which he said he wanted to put into a Fidelity money market that he could write checks off of. And he wanted online banking. Koob was no longer afraid or intimidated or ambitious. He never thought of his mother once. Marilyn never knew about the visit. He used their home address but not his real name, and fake IDs. His poor penmanship didn’t bother him enough to hide it.

  Cavanaugh was not a bastard about their brief meeting. Pleasant enough, he just didn’t see Yakoob as completely a man yet, it seemed, but someone in between. Koob could tell this by the low expectations from which his questions came, the busy but charitable tone talking down to him. And as he listened and occasionally answered without the slightest inflection, Koob imagined the man before him crying at his home somewhere, with his wife of a million years distraught beside him, having just gotten the final news that the bank had completed its investigation. After twenty-five years, it was firing him. That he better clear out his mahogany desk immediately and hire a lawyer, because there were probably going to be charges brought. And maybe, just maybe, this man could hang it up—his prospects of ever working for another bank, his pension, and his name—all because one day he looked out at the waiting area and mistook a black man in blue for someone who didn’t matter.

  20

  THE FACT THAT AUNT CHICKIE’S REACTION to Sidarra’s confession of love combined careful indifference with a killjoy warning was further proof that she deserved Griff. Sidarra deserved Griff because her own mother would never again react with the excitement and celebration love’s arrival demands. And Sidarra would never witness the great meeting she’d always envisioned between her father and the man she’d choose as second best on earth. For the same reason, Sidarra deserved nice clothes, a great brownstone, and a healthy daughter. All of these were not conscious understandings yet. But without her mother and father’s love, she discovered, her just desserts in life might never again come unconditionally. She would have to go out and find them, even take them. This too was the continuing work of grief, a kind of soul’s work she could get tired of, it occurred to her, as she drove up the Henry Hudson Parkway in her sky blue Mercedes, listening to Aretha sing for the river beside her and trying to reach the Christmas pageant at Raquel’s new school on time. Sidarra deserved two chemical peels to remove the last layer of a three-month descent into disfigurement—and the dermatologist visit early that morning, too. She probably deserved the Mercedes as consolation for pityriasis rosea. She deserved Griff because it was Christmas. But all that would remain inside. There was no one left to tell about her jones. All she could think about were his hands.

  ST. AUGUSTINE’S WAS AN OLD RAMBLING STONE building set on a campus that overlooked the Hudson River at the northern tip of Manhattan. By five o’clock, it was bathed in evening sunset. The school was so affluent that Raquel still qualified for a generous financial aid package; its parents were so leisurely that getting to the leafy edge of the island by five o’clock caused no problems at work. When Sidarra reached the parking lot and found a space, her Mercedes joined several others, some Lexus’s, Land Rovers, and BMWs that had already arrived. She walked up the gentle, bush-lined path to the main entryway with other parents. The idyllic setting contrasted with the dry faces of serious strangers. With the exception of a few black parents and a few more Latinos, nearly everyone was white. They had name charts of the children hanging on bulletin boards outside the auditorium, and though it’s hard to tell a Catholic name, very few people seemed to be Catholic. When the parents were seated and the little show began, most of the biblical references and Catholic twists seemed to sail right over the heads of the audience, including Sidarra’s. This was Aunt Chickie’s point about “making bank” put another way. Nowadays, you didn’t need to be in love or even understand the religion behind the membership as long as being in the membership brought all the other blessings of a good life. In this case, that membership cost about $18,000 a year, depending on the grade. Attending the religious ritual in a room that looked a lot like a church was just another deposit on your membership dues, not a sign of surrender.

  Boys from the brother school across the way joined the girls for the production. Once the show started, the cuteness was suffocating. Raquel only had a part in the chorus, but the other little actors were doing their adorable best to get their lines out, be Jesus, and pretend like they knew how to be somebody from two thousand years ago. There were more
chuckles than applause for the third and fourth graders. Sidarra stopped counting the other lone mothers sitting in the rows. All she could see was her daughter’s bright shining teeth in her wide-open mouth singing as hard as she could.

  “Mommy!” Raquel screamed when she spotted her from the edge of the stage at the end of the show. Sidarra jostled her way among the excited parents to get to her kid.

  “You were wonderful!” Sidarra cooed into her ear as she held her up and kissed all over her face. “That was just great. Mommy’s very proud of you.”

  “We didn’t make any mistakes at all!” Raquel beamed as they started up the aisle holding hands. “Not one.”

  “Everybody was great. You all did a great job. Hey!” Sidarra suddenly called out. A little red-haired boy running full blast through the tangle of kids and parents had slammed into Raquel’s back on his way to his waiting parents. If Sidarra hadn’t been holding her, Raquel would have been knocked to the floor. The boy didn’t even turn around. Sidarra looked down to check on Raquel, whose triumphant expression had gone crestfallen as she rubbed her shoulder. “You okay, darling?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be all right.”

  Sidarra took her by the hand and they hurriedly made their way through the crowd to the top of the aisle where the little boy was talking excitedly to his parents. Sidarra interrupted.

  “Excuse me, but did you see what your child just did to my little girl?” she asked.

  The parents looked at her like the intrusion she was, then at each other in momentary disbelief. “I beg your pardon,” the father said with a sharp hint of irritation in his voice. “We’re talking to our son right now.” The mother returned to hear the story her son was recounting.

  “He just ran up from behind us and knocked her down!” Sidarra continued.

  Silence. The boy looked up at his parents, who were not particularly moved. “It’s not my fault. She wouldn’t get out of the way.”