Hold Love Strong

by Matthew Aaron Goodman

  “Come,” she said, motioning for me to follow her into the kitchen. “Even if we can’t find the keys then at least let me make you something to eat. You Abraham, so I know you must be hungry.”

  BAR 5

  Holidays

  I

  My mother was nowhere to be found, not at the park, not at anyone’s barbeque or picnic, not with friends in front of our building, not sitting on one of the benches in the concrete courtyard, not anywhere along Columbus or Washington avenues. It was the beginning of summer and I had just completed the seventh grade. My mother was missing for three days going on four. Then it was after midnight and my grandma and Rhonda were in the kitchen talking about my mother. They argued. They shouted. I was in bed. Donnel lay next to me. Eric was on the mattress on the floor. Everything could be heard through the walls. They didn’t hold opposing opinions. They were in agreement. So they argued because they didn’t want to agree, because they hoped that the other might say something that was more true than the truth they knew. No my mother couldn’t be. No, not her. Not crack.

  “What else could it be?” demanded my grandma.

  “And the way her arms is all clawed up,” my Aunt Rhonda yelled. “What kind of rash is that?”

  “She told me she caught an allergy!” my grandma shouted. “And she ain’t never had no allergy in all her life so what she suddenly allergic to?”

  “She looks like she been eaten alive!” burst my Aunt Rhonda.

  “And what would eat her in the first place?” asked my grandma. “Jelly has become nothing but some bones and a whole heap of lies!”

  Who could sleep with all of their shouting? I wished I could. But I was not even tired. I was only anger, a silent rage with ears in bed.

  “A,” Donnel whispered. “You awake?”

  I didn’t answer. I hated him. Where had he been all day? And if my mother was a crackhead what had or hadn’t he done to make it so? Lord help me if she got the crack from him. So I couldn’t speak. Because I was afraid to. Because inside my throat was a rope that pulled my toes to my nose each time I breathed. And if I opened my mouth, I was sure that all of my insides would fall out and I would break wide open and weep. And I refused to weep. I would not. At least not in the blue darkness of the bedroom with Donnel and Eric present. If I was to cry I would cry alone. Maybe in the morning as I walked to school. But then again maybe not. I had begun to set decrees upon myself, rules that I believed would quicken my maturity, hasten my manhood, make any sensation related to pain and loss vanish with the rest of childish wants, things, and feelings.

  Donnel propped himself up and looked over my shoulder. He put his face close to mine. His warm breath pushed on my neck and cheek.

  “A,” he said. “You really sleeping?”

  Again, I didn’t answer. I kept my eyes closed, and although I felt them quivering I tried to keep my lips as still as possible.

  Suddenly she was home and my grandma and my Aunt Rhonda were shouting at her.

  “Jelly!” said my Aunt Rhonda. “Where you been?”

  “Tell us now!” shouted my grandma. “What’s going on? What you got yourself into?”

  My mother denied everything. And she was professional about it. She didn’t stutter, hem and haw. She never circled back and reconstructed her previous position. She made everything sound simple and plain. She’d lost weight because the summer was coming and who didn’t want to look good. And the rash was a rash. And she was no doctor. So how was she supposed to know what the rash was from? And her hair? Well, shit, she just hadn’t had the time. With all the running around for the last few days. Did they know she was working? Yeah, she got her old job back at the McDonald’s. In fact, that’s where she was coming from.

  “My work clothes?” she said. “I leave them at work. I ain’t trying to walk around dressed like Ronald McDonald.”

  “Look at yourself,” my Aunt Rhonda hammered. “Jelly, God damn, you look like one of those crackheads you used to make fun of!”

  “Think of Abraham!” shouted my grandma. “He don’t deserve no mother like this!”

  In a swirl and rush, Donnel threw the sheet off and stormed out of our room, opening the door, then slamming it behind himself.

  “Abraham’s sleeping!” he shouted. “Fuck! Can’t you all respect that!”

  “Who you talking to?” my grandma exploded. “Who you cursing at like that?”

  “I’m cursing you!” Donnel countered, his voice not the voice of a teenager but the sure, huge booms of bombs and big brick buildings slamming to the ground. “I’m saying you all need to shut the fuck up!”

  “Get out! God damn it! Get out!” burst my grandma.

  Then I heard slapping, a hand slamming against the bare skin of a flat back and chest, a muscular neck, the hard bones of a face. Who was hitting whom? Was it my mother? Was Donnel hitting my Aunt Rhonda? Had they ganged up on my grandma? Suddenly, the door swung open. I played dead. I was afraid the fight, the war was coming for me. I lay on my side, my hands knotted between my neck and chin. I focused on keeping my eyes closed in a way that they would look like eyes look when people are really asleep. I felt light on my face, saw red on the back of my eyelids. I heard someone open a drawer and slam the drawer closed. I heard someone snatch something else, a sweat jacket. I recognized the sound of its zipper smacking against the armoire. It was Donnel.

  “Fuck you!” he shouted. “Jelly’s a crackhead! Why you even asking her about it? And you all crazy! You all go fuck yourselves!”

  “D,” begged Eric. “D, don’t go.”

  Donnel leapt onto the bed and kneeled behind me. He planted his hand on my shoulder. Then he leaned forward over me.

  “A,” he whispered, his breath a warm thump on my neck. “I know you ain’t sleeping.”

  There was a second of nothing, a second of tranquility, a silence so utter and complete I felt my heart beating in my chest and the blood pumping through my arms and legs. Then Donnel slammed his lips against the side of my face. He kissed.

  “I’ll be back,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  I squeezed my eyes tight. He’s lying, I thought, lying like my mother; lying like everyone else. They’re all liars, I thought. Every single one. Even me, I thought. Even if I don’t know it.

  II

  My mother and I sat on the couch, saying nothing to each other and with a foot of space between us. On the television, a chorus sang the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there while fireworks exploded above New York City’s skyline. Outside, bottle rockets, firecrackers, and sporadic gunshots whistled and popped, and a tangle of many songs from numerous stereos climbed high into the sky and fell into our apartment, stumbling, smashing, wielding cacophony. It was as hot and steamy in our apartment as it was outside, and the rotten stench of the hot garbage overflowing from the Dumpsters behind our building was joined by the smell of barbeque. My mother was sweating. Her once rich brown skin was moist, taut, and sickly, rife with olive undertones and mauve stains beneath her eyes and in the barren valleys that were once her cheeks. She sat like a boxer, exhausted in a corner. Her arms were flaccid in her lap. Her torso was concave. She blinked once, real slow and real hard, as if it took all of her focus to close her eyelids and then all of her strength to open them again. Regardless of what my mother did and who she was, I loved her. But that is not why only she and I were home on the Fourth of July. We were stuck. That is, my grandma was at work, Donnel and Eric and my Aunt Rhonda were somewhere celebrating independence, and my mother was approaching being clean for one week. So in addition to lacking the fortitude to refuse the temptations that were certainly outside, she had promised my grandma and my aunt that she was going to stay in. As for me, I promised my grandma that I would stay with her. Yet that is not the only reason I was stuck on the couch. No, I was also stuck because I was caught between wanting to barge into my mother’s brain and rearrange what she craved and wanting her to
get away from me forever. So I was paralyzed by the impossibility of one feat and the guilt created by the hate that made me desire the other. How could she have become who she was? How could she be so vicious to herself?

  She wiped her hand down the side of her gaunt face. “Abraham,” she said.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.

  She put her hand on my leg and shook it just a bit. “Abraham,” she repeated. “Get some ice from the freezer.”

  We weren’t drinking anything but I didn’t ask why she wanted ice. I looked down and noted the contrast between her bony hand and my brown leg, and I considered if I should leave her, if when I stood and turned my back she would bolt for the door. Because of hope, I quickly decided that she wouldn’t, and if she did in fact try to flee I surmised that she was too weak to get to the door and out of the apartment before I stopped her. So I stood and walked into the kitchen. The light switch was to my left and I turned it on. Dishes were in the sink. A few rapidly rotting bananas were on the counter. Fruit flies hovered above and landed on them. My grandma’s birds chirped. Their feathers were slicked. To combat the heat, they bathed themselves in their drinking water. I opened the freezer and took out a plastic tray of ice. Then I turned off the kitchen light and returned to the couch, putting the tray between us. My mother took a deep breath, grabbed the ice tray, and twisted it with both hands. An ice cube popped out, bounced off the couch, and landed on the floor.

  “Get that,” she said.

  I got the ice cube from the floor and my mother twisted the ice tray again. She was so weak her arms shook before another cube popped out and landed on the floor just like the first.

  “Shit,” she said, frustrated by her weakness. “Why don’t they make it easier to get out?”

  I wished I had an answer, but nothing came to mind. I got the second ice cube off the floor and held both in one hand. Where I could put them? If it had been any other day and I had been with any other person I would have either taken the ice cubes into the kitchen and put them in the sink or left them on the floor to melt. But because I felt as if I could not trust my mother, and because I had given her one opportunity to flee but I would not give her two, and because I was shocked by the fact that she barely had the strength to twist the plastic ice tray, I remained on the couch. Finally, my mother was able to dislodge then pick an ice cube out of the tray with her fingers.

  “Here,” she said, holding the ice cube out to me. “Rub it on my neck.”

  I took the ice cube and my mother tilted her head down. Then I touched the ice cube to the back of her skeletal neck and she shivered.

  “Shit’s cold,” she said. “Go slow.”

  I slipped the ice cube up and down and back and forth, making figure eights around the crest and trough of her vertebrae. I still did not look at her. But as I watched the TV, the bursting of fireworks, their iridescent and luminescent rain, I thought about her. How had she become so shrunken and trapped inside the shell beside me? She took deep breaths through her nose and sighed softly. Tears filled my eyes. I began to cry silently and the flashes of fireworks on the TV became neon streams falling before me. I still held the ice cubes in my other hand. Their cold made my palm ache. As they melted, water seeped between my fingers and dripped on the couch, still one of my grandma’s most prized possessions. The ice cube I slid along my mother’s neck melted quickly as well. Water ran in rivulets over her skin and it soaked the collar of her shirt.

  As if she’d heard a voice, my mother lifted her head and stared at the TV. Then she looked at me. Her eyes were magnets. Mine were metal filings. There was nothing I could do, nowhere to go, no way I could thwart their pull. Finally, I looked at her too.

  “Abraham,” she whispered. “You crying?”

  The question made me empty. I was speechless. I didn’t move. I couldn’t even blink or twitch.

  “Oh, Mister Man,” she sighed.

  My mother cupped her hand against the side of my face and gently pulled me toward her. I fell like an ember, slow and steady until my head landed in her lap. I closed my eyes. Could I sleep and dream everything away? I heard the fireworks’ finale on the TV, the pops, booms, and bangs. The ice cubes melted in my hands. The ache they created dissipated until it became a faint throb, then the silent flapping of wings in the distance. My mother stroked my head. She massaged my earlobe between her thumb and index finger. How could we explain our pains to each other?

  “We gonna be all right,” she whispered. She let her hand rest on the side of my face. “Promise. Just don’t never give up.”

  I placed my hand on top of my mother’s hand. “I won’t,” I said. “I swear it.”

  III

  There were bodies stricken with a rampant, devastating emptiness; lovers and beloveds; I knew them, all of them, if not by name then by face; if they didn’t live in Ever then they lived around; they had children in my school, children in my class, children who played at the park with me; they were everywhere, like gore splattered around the wreckage of the room, naked and fully clothed, tangled and strewn about, trounced upon, torn and tussled and turned inside out; to my right, to my left, all over the floor; mashed and mangled in the narrow halls; leaning, lonely shadows on the wall, crying and muttering to themselves; hollering, bleating like battered sheep; brothers and sisters and mothers and aunts and uncles and grandmas and sons and daughters. It was the day before my thirteenth birthday. I was in the crackhouse on the corner of Columbus and Pine, but I could have been in any of the crackhouses that riddled Ever Park and its surroundings. Rats and roaches and militias of dumb, stumbling maggots the size of Tic Tacs and pinky toes; broken bottles, crushed aluminum cans, gaping holes in all of the walls; candles, melted to nubs, seeping and sagging on the floor, singed slivers and shards of wood, cardboard, makeshift campfires were here, there, everywhere. The windows were boarded. The door was bolted, soldered shut. There were holes large enough for a person to squeeze through in the ceiling. I’d squeezed through. Reluctantly, street light did the same, falling through the room, splintering and bathing my brown skin a muddy, blood red. I was on a mission, governed by an irrefutable responsibility. My mother had relapsed. I hadn’t seen her for a week; not outside, not inside, not far off in the distance, stumbling or dragging herself in circles like a bird with a broken wing.

  I breathed because I had to, because it was an involuntary bodily function, not because I had the strength. I covered my nose and gasped through my mouth, the rancid stench, a taste of fetid diesel that scraped across my teeth, burned my tongue, and planted a viscous phlegm in my throat that hung from my tonsils and dripped an imminent devastation into my lungs one splatter at a time.

  “Mom,” I shouted. “Mom! You here?”

  She smoked crack as if the smoke were a rope to rapture. Unapologetically, greedily, with an unabashed determination, she smoked it wherever oxygen reached. Rain, sleet, or snow. Morning, noon, and night. Had she sold her body for crack? Would someone knock out her front teeth or tear her earring from her ear, leaving the lobe cleaved and floppy? All of these things happened to crackheads. All of my mother, including the parts neither she nor God had ever dreamed, was gone.

  We had fought with her. We had told her no more, not now, never, not one more time. We cried. We hollered. We begged. My grandma took me to church. We held hands and prayed for my mother. We called upon Jesus and Mary Magdalene. We looked to Psalms for guidance. We looked to Proverbs. My grandma Scotch-taped inspirational quotes on the refrigerator to give her, to give us strength. But did it matter? When Donnel was around he said it wouldn’t. I stayed silent and thought against him. My mind kicked and punched and screamed for him to stop. I thought everything, including it, was his fault, an idea too sick to say, too ghastly to put my breath into. He swore my mother was a fiend and she was a fiend for good. He said he’d seen it before, a thousand times over, she was not my mother, but just like the rest of them, a crack whore whose sole goal was death no matter if she knew it or not,
no matter if it came quick or slow. Of course Eric had agreed with him. Of course he just repeated what Donnel said when Donnel was not around. And my Aunt Rhonda had said as far as she was concerned she didn’t have a sister anymore and sought sanctuary in the arms of this and that man to keep her from changing her mind.

  As for me, I had done three things. One: I went to school. I sat like a piece of furniture in class. I stared out of the window, put my head down on the desk. I did my work when I felt like it. I passed it in rarely and most often never. I didn’t raise my hand, not once. My mother, she whose sole responsibility was to love me unconditionally, proved I held less value than a small chunk of baking soda and cocaine. So what did I have to ask or contribute? So I had stopped talking. I had become mute. Two: I played basketball. Up and down the court I went. I practiced for hours. I pounded and shot until my fingernails split from their beds and bled my fingerprints all over the ball. And three: I searched for my mother. And I refused to give up. I scoured Ever. I swept and memorized every inch. I walked every desire line a crackhead could travel. Each time I found her, I dragged her home. Once, I carried her over my shoulders like a sack of wet cement. She had crack. But seeking was my addiction.

  So I was relentless, tireless. And I swore I would always be.

  “Mom,” I shouted. “Ma, where you at?”

  To my left there was a couch, soiled and pocked with burn holes. To my right there was a broken wooden chair covered with a bloody pillow. On the carpet there were spots that had been burned away and dark stains the shape of countries and continents. I wanted to disappear, blink and vanish. Just somewhere, anywhere was everywhere I wanted to be. But I couldn’t. I promised. And what would happen to her if I broke the promise? The question was projection. That is, my real fear was: what would happen to me if I let go?