So, every Christmas Mr. Goines showed up at our door with a Christmas tree. Every Valentine’s Day: a dozen roses. Once, he arrived sweating and straining, his arms wrapped around a potted palm tree. And once, he showed up with birds.
My mother and my Aunt Rhonda were in the bathroom, leaning over the sink, squeezing their reflections into the small square mirror at the same time, hurrying to put on eyeliner, lip gloss, and mascara. Although they had each borne children, my mother and my Aunt Rhonda had the bodies of young, sexy sisters prepared to do nothing less than love. My mother was eighteen and the adolescence she had possessed and carried me within had become a bouquet she didn’t know how to hold, present, nor take flattery for. The curves, the lush smile that made fireworks of her eyes, the way she threw her head back when she laughed and leaned forward when she sighed, all of the physicality that men cooed and fawned over, were like something sticky yet unable to be removed or washed away. So she tried to hide it. She hunched and slouched. She covered her mouth with one hand. She folded her arms over her chest when young men were near. My Aunt Rhonda was the opposite. She was twenty-two and determined to not just be loved but be worshipped by every brother who laid his eyes on her. Her face and body, although more than moderately attractive, were constructions of elongated ovals with no clear perimeters, so parts faded into others, her eyes into her cheeks, her jaw into her neck, her shoulders into her narrow back, her back into her hips, her hips disappearing into her thighs. She complained about her physical shape all the time, how her body was half the body of my mother’s, how her breasts dropped if she didn’t cinch the straps of her bra. Yet she wore the tightest clothes and carried herself as if at the end of her limbs and on top of her head were plumes of jeweled feathers. And around young men, she used the most suggestive language, licked her lips, cocked her hips, and pretended to be dumb.
Sometimes, after hours of cajoling, my Aunt Rhonda was able to get my mother to dress and, at least, attempt to act like her. And on the night Lyndon Goines arrived with birds in hand, my Aunt Rhonda had succeeded. So my Aunt Rhonda and my mother wore matching tight white pants, white heels, and royal blue blouses that squeezed their breasts and ended in frills at their waists. They had a date, the twins from the third floor, calm, cool Jamel and his antithesis Dave, otherwise known as Doo-Doo, the heavyset, pigeon-toed brother with a lazy eye and a perpetually runny nose who my Aunt Rhonda swore she was only spending time with because she was a good sister, and she wanted the best for my mom, and Jamel and Doo-Doo were a package deal. Like every man between the age of eighteen and forty who was either secure enough to disregard the fact that my mother had a child or ignorant about the degree to which my mother had had her heart broken, Jamel had a crush on my mother. But two things made him different than the others. First, every sister in Ever had a crush on Jamel, but because he wouldn’t give them the time of day, they hated him, spread rumors that he was a homosexual, that his penis was so itsy bitsy there was no chance at being pleased. And second, none of the sisters’ nastiness, none of their remarks or disapproval, or attempts to lure Jamel away from the despondency my mother dealt him, distracted him from what he wished for: one date with my mother. My Aunt Rhonda couldn’t fathom what my mother’s problem was. “You just like Momma,” she’d huff on a nightly basis, her hands jammed on her hips. “You don’t think any nigga is good enough!” But finally, my mother had given in. Finally, she had accepted Jamel’s offer.
There was a knock on the door. Then there was another. My cousins and I sat on the couch, but we didn’t move to answer it. We were watching cartoons, mesmerized by the TV, absorbing all of the heroism we could. Donnel was nine and he didn’t respond to noise unless it was Eric or me interfering with his relationship with the TV, asking questions or breathing too heavily or sneezing or coughing. Eric was seven and at the beginning of his infatuation with drawing things he saw and things he swore he had once seen. He had a few old crayons and markers on his lap and some paper he’d taken from school and he was in the midst of drawing the characters in the cartoon. I, sitting forward, my legs dangling above the floor, was five and very much an imitator of Donnel and, to some degree, Eric. Thus, because they ignored the door, so did I.
A third knock came and my Aunt Rhonda hurried out of the bathroom, sure it was her and my mother’s dates.
“You all don’t hear that?” she scolded, sashaying across the room, placing one foot directly in front of the other, her hips slamming left and right, as if the person on the other side of the door could see her.
“Hear what?” said Donnel, his eyes trained on the TV.
“Boy,” my Aunt Rhonda said, continuing to the door, “what I tell you before I started getting dressed?”
Although still a child, Donnel chose which questions he answered and which he ignored. So he was silent. My Aunt Rhonda stopped walking, put her hand on her hip, and waited if not for his answer then someone’s. I was missing my two front teeth, and although I was too shy to smile and I covered my mouth with my hands when I couldn’t stop myself from doing so, and although I recognized that everything I said sounded wet and whispery, I didn’t yet understand that knowing an answer didn’t require that I blurt it out. So I spoke.
“You said,” I slurred. “‘Don’t start noth’n.’”
Quickly, Donnel pinned his middle finger on his thumb, then snapped it free, flicking me in the middle of the forehead so hard the blow knocked me back on the couch and the pain caused me to squint. But I didn’t hold my head with both hands or squirm as if desperate to get out from under it. I heard Eric laugh and swung my foot to kick him.
“That’s enough,” ordered my aunt.
With a long, swift stride to the couch, she yanked me upright. My eyes welled with tears. The middle of my forehead burned from the blow. Then my mother walked out of the bathroom and I swallowed, blinked, and sailed years away from pain. Even at the age of five, I was overcome by my mother’s beauty when she let her beauty shine. She could transform herself, metamorphose from a gritty, testy sister who wore neither a smile nor a hint of being delicate to a being who exuded feminine glory.
“Abraham, sit right,” she said.
I sat as tall as I could, for not only did my mother demand it, but, although I was only five, her being in love and making her angry were the thing I most wanted and the thing I never wanted to do. Maybe Jamel would be the one; maybe he would be my father.
My mother tugged at the bottom of her shirt. She shifted and squirmed. She hooked her thumbs in the top of her pants and pulled them up.
“This shit’s tight as hell,” she said.
My Aunt Rhonda quickly stepped to my mother. She fixed and repositioned her clothes. Then she shifted my mother’s breasts in balance and tried to smooth a ripple out of the back of her pants.
“You got panties on?” she asked.
“How you know?” said my mother.
“Cause I see the line,” said my Aunt Rhonda. Then she pointed at the bedroom they shared with my grandma. “Take ’em off.”
“What you mean?” my mother asked.
“Don’t wear none.” My Aunt Rhonda gave my mother a gentle push. “Hurry up. Go.”
My mother left the room and my Aunt Rhonda went to the front door and with one hand on the knob and the other ready to unhook the latch, she watched my mother close the bedroom door. Then she looked at Donnel, Eric, and me.
“You ready?” she asked.
She took a moment more to assess her own beauty, pressed an easy smile across her face, and opened the door. But to the surprise of us all, it was not Jamel and Doo-Doo at the door. It was Mr. Goines. Dressed in a wrinkled brown suit, white shirt, and yellow paisley tie, he took one long step into the middle of the room holding a small birdcage covered with a soiled bath towel.
“Lovebirds,” he said, pulling the towel from atop the cage. “Where is she?”
“She ain’t here,” said my Aunt Rhonda, still holding the door ajar.
The bi
rds chirped and cheeped, and I leapt from the couch and ran to the cage Mr. Goines held, his arm extended high at his side.
“You got birds?” I asked.
The birds were radiant. Dusty green feathers covered their bodies. Sunset red was their face. Their eyes were small black pearls. Donnel and Eric hurried from the couch and stood beside me.
“What’s their names?” Eric asked.
“They don’t have names,” Mr. Goines said.
“How do you got birds with no names?” said Donnel, peering into the cage like a child but sounding like the truculent young man he was bent on becoming.
“They’re for your grandma to name,” said Mr. Goines.
The bedroom door opened and my mother walked out. Mr. Goines looked up, studied her, and said: “You know, the older you get, the more I swear you your mother’s twin.”
Although she was always accepting of Mr. Goines, his gifts, his sudden arrivals, and the love he had for my grandma, the comment embarrassed my mother and she blushed, her penny-color skin swelling a warmer shade. She looked down and curled into herself a bit.
“Mr. Goines,” she said. “What you doing here?”
“He’s got birds,” I announced.
“I see that.” My mother smiled at me. She looked at Mr. Goines and a tumble of airy laughter rolled from her mouth.
“You giving Momma birds?” she asked.
“She know you’re bringing them?” scolded my Aunt Rhonda, sounding jealous.
Mr. Goines thought for a moment. Then he shifted his eyes to my Aunt Rhonda. “With all due respect, I believe your mother is the type of woman who knows more than she knows.”
My Aunt Rhonda jammed her hand on her hip and tilted her head incredulously. “What kind of crazy shit is that?” she asked. “Huh? Cause I know you ain’t trying to make no sense saying some nonsense like that.”
“It means that Momma ain’t got to know to know,” my mother answered. “She been around long enough to know birds in a cage was bound to happen.”
“How can you tell one from the other?” I asked no one in particular. “You ain’t supposed to,” said Donnel, his cheek brushing against the side of my face with each word he spoke.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Cause they birds,” he said. “They meant to fly, not be here with us.”
The birds stayed close together on the perch and although they looked fragile there was a fierceness to their unity, an inseparable inseparability. Donnel squeezed his finger through the bars of the cage to see how close he could come to touching the birds. The birds chirped. Then they flew back and forth in the cage, from one side of the bars to the other, stopping to hold on to each wall of bars before flying again, flapping until they came to rest together on the bars at the back of the cage. Donnel whistled to the birds. And I watched the birds pause, tilt their heads, and consider his song. I glanced over my shoulder at my mother. She smiled at me. I don’t recall what I was thinking, but it was clear that whatever it was she understood so her empathy made me feel good. I turned my eyes back to the birds, then shifted them just enough to see Donnel purse his lips and whistle more. I couldn’t whistle, both because I didn’t know how and because my teeth were missing. But then, that didn’t stop me from trying. I watched Donnel’s lips for a moment more and listened to his airy tune. Then I turned my face to the birds again, took a deep breath, pursed my lips as best as I could, and breathed a gentle wind that joined Donnel’s song as it crossed through the bars and ruffled the birds’ feathers on the other side of the cage.
II
As a child, I was obsessed with flight. Sometimes, before I went to sleep, I’d lie beneath the sheets and pretend I was a bird, a cloud, an astronaut, a superhero with the super power of not speeding or soaring, but floating, drifting according to the whim of wind. When a plane passed over Ever, I’d stop whatever I was doing, stop playing, stop teasing, stop walking, stop talking, and look up. Later, when I became a teenager and I began to develop a sense of the world and where I was in it, and when I was feeling awry and no one was around to say Nigga? What’re you doing? I threw things at planes that passed overhead. I threw anything that was near, anything I could snatch and heave: rocks and basketballs; bricks and books, chewing gum, pens, pencils, glass bottles; even spit; and when there was no object to be found, when I stood amidst nothing, I hurled fistfuls of emptiness, sometimes one after the other, sometimes at the same time.
I wasn’t the only Icarus in Ever. Far from it. Percival, a dark-skinned brother whose angry disposition was lost the moment he spoke about his son Shakeem, taught Shakeem how to fold perfect paper airplanes, and together they spent Sunday mornings throwing their planes from their window and watching how far they sailed before landing on the concrete that surrounded Ever, the concrete courtyard—the cracked concrete parking lot, the concrete sidewalk that shrank in the winter, then swelled, heaved, and fractured more and more each summer. And Mr. Lucas, an old, gangly flutist from the fourth floor who had once lived in France, had a parrot named Charlie Parker that he never placed in a cage, so it flew, shat, and shelled peanuts wherever it wanted. And Tariq Abdullah, a stout, muscular, reckless blasphemer who’d become Muslim and grounded during his stay in Franklin Correctional Facility, fed the pigeons on the roof with saltines while pacing and reading aloud from the Qur’an. On the basketball court, brothers argued over who jumped higher, who had the greatest hang time; who flew. The best-looking women were fly. Everyone wanted Air Jordans. Crackheads got high. You smoked dope and got lifted. When I was sixteen, Anthony Roberson, an effeminate, bespectacled fifteen-year-old with a chipped front tooth and the best dance moves anyone in Ever had ever seen, spread his lithe arms like wings, ran as fast as he could, then hopped, skipped, pirouetted, and leapt from the roof of my building and screamed all the way down.
Then there was Tyrone Jackson, the Vietnam veteran who was first mocked, then, eventually, reverentially dubbed Lindbergh. A helicopter mechanic, Lindbergh served two tours fighting for democracy and freedom. Some said he had been the most handsome man in all of Queens before America dropped him in Da Nang and Lindbergh, a toothless loon with half a head of short, dry dreadlocks and a shopping cart full of miscellany, replaced him. Lindbergh collected cans and scrap metal and anything else he could sell to make an honest living. Seven days a week, rain or shine, oppressively humid, fiercely hot, and in the unbearably cold, he wore fatigues, a field jacket, and a black beret as he pushed his cart and scrounged through Dumpsters and garbage cans so much his hands were as hard as hooves and his fingers were talons. Everyone said Lindbergh was crazy. Some said he was lost. Some said he needed Jesus. Jehovah’s Witnesses chased Lindbergh down and handed him flyers. Sometimes one of Ever’s scratch-ticket addicts or Lotto fiends bought him a cup of coffee from the corner store and stood outside drinking coffee with him, sipping and saying this or that, trying to get Lindbergh to open up. Occasionally, someone offered Lindbergh a day’s pay doing backbreaking labor, shoveling rubble, demolishing a decrepit building in the neighborhood with a crowbar, and occasionally he’d do it, hammering and shoveling all day without taking a moment’s break. Some people said Lindbergh was a drunk, that his body pumped Night Train, not blood. Some said he was a junkie, that he jammed this or that into his arms and lungs. Some said he was broken. Most agreed that his soul had been stolen.
But none of it was true. Because before Lindbergh was anything—in fact, before Lindbergh was a soldier—he was an artist. He was a creator, an innovator, silently but radically forthright with regards to what he wished, what he deemed necessary for himself, his environment, and us, we, the people of Ever Park. The trash and miscellany Lindbergh couldn’t sell, he bent, twisted, affixed, and built into helicopters. Hundreds of them. The size of small cars, the size of infants, small enough to rest in the palm of your hand. Helicopters from cans too crushed to be redeemable. Helicopters from plastic forks, bottle caps, and the spokes from bicycle wheels. Lindbergh built helicopters whereve
r the spirit moved him, in stairwells, in the park, perched on the backs of benches where pigeons sat impervious to the earthbound concoctions. Sometimes, I’d wake up and walk out of my building in the morning and there one would be, smack in the middle of the sidewalk, a four-foot psychedelic chopper with a working propeller made of mattress springs and detergent containers. Lindbergh’s helicopters would sit there, randomly placed around Ever, until someone took them, children played with them until they broke, or the weather, the elements of the world, tore them apart.
Once Lindbergh gave a helicopter to my mother. It was built out of potato chip bags, sip-box straws, and garbage ties. I was six. She was nineteen. It was winter and we were waiting for the bus. We were on our way to the emergency room at the hospital because I had whooping cough and it kept me gasping and coughing up thick green phlegm all night. My coat was zipped to my chin. A knit hat was pulled over my eyebrows, and a thick red wool scarf was looped around my neck. I coughed, gagged, and gasped and everyone standing at the bus stop except my mother stepped away from me.
“Abraham,” she scolded. “Cover your mouth. The whole world don’t want what you got.”
I coughed again and a wad of phlegm jumped from my lungs into my mouth.
“Spit,” my mother demanded, peeling the plastic lid off of a paper coffee cup and holding it in front of my mouth.
I spit in the cup that was already half full of mucus and my mother put the plastic lid back on.
“They gonna see now,” she huffed, simultaneously talking to herself and anyone who would listen. “Take my baby to the doctor and the man says he just got a little cold.”
My mother stepped from the curb and stood in the middle of the street. She jammed her hands on her hips, glared down the empty road, the distance that was to produce the bus.
Hold Love Strong Page 3