Sunday You Learn How to Box

by Bil Wright

  When “In a Trance” was over, Shiny Pants called to Cee-Cee, “You know what to do!” and Cee-Cee played it again. He didn’t seem to mind. He laughed and said something under his breath about Shiny Pants trying to cop an extra feel, but I started humming so he wouldn’t think I heard him. That’s when I looked up at the door and saw Ray Anthony Robinson.

  He didn’t come all the way into the apartment. He eased in against the wall so that he was right next to the doorway, leaning with his thumbs in his pockets and his hips thrust out into the room the same way he had when I’d first seen him, behind the bushes. He had a little hat on too, like the guy dancing with Delilah, except his was black. It occurred to me those hats and the way they wore them made Ray Anthony and the guy push pushing with Delilah look like the only two men in a room full of boys.

  Ray Anthony’s pants were shiny, too. Gray, shiny and hugging his butt.

  “Will ya gimme, gimme one more chance? / your ooo ooo love has me in a trance.”

  Ray Anthony saw me, he had to see me sitting across the room from him. In the dark. In the corner. Next to the record player. I kept dusting the 45 in my lap round and round with my reindeer sweater, trying not to stare at him. When I knew Cee-Cee wasn’t looking, I took a few swallows from one of the cups he hadn’t touched yet.

  “In a Trance” was over. Cee-Cee put on a fast one.

  “Baby, baby, come on, come on / Baby, baby, ’cause your love’s so strong.”

  I threw my head around to the drums and sang along. I knocked my knees together in time. What I really wanted to do was ask Ray Anthony Robinson if he’d dance with me. The floor was crowded now. I couldn’t find him across the floor anymore. So I took another quick gulp of beer and stood. I got up for the first time since I’d come in and leaned against the wall like I’d seen Ray Anthony do. There he was. I looked right at him. I wanted to wave to him, but I didn’t. I smiled, though. I tapped my foot, bobbed my neck, twisted my hips. And I smiled at Ray Anthony Robinson. Singing in my high voice, “Baby, baby come on, come on.”

  After a while, Delilah came over to the record player, whispered to Cee-Cee and he nodded. He pulled a small flashlight out of his jacket pocket. Delilah went and turned the blue light off so that now the room was completely dark. Somebody snickered. One girl squealed, “Oh no you won’t!” and I saw her silhouette when she opened the door to the apartment and hurried out.

  I looked toward the wall where Ray Anthony had been standing, but I couldn’t see him anymore. Cee-Cee nudged me.

  “You hold the flashlight.”

  My hand was kind of shaky, but I was glad I still had a job. Now Cee-Cee was only playing slow songs.

  “If you, if you need me to / I’ll sure nuff play the fool for you” and “Lay down baby, by my side / Love’s gonna keep you satisfied.”

  After the third record was over I held my breath, knowing that was when I was supposed to point the flashlight down to the floor between my legs so it wouldn’t glare out into the room. Instead, I held it up and pointed it at the wall next to the door. Yes! Ray Anthony was still there. Alone. The light hit his face. He covered his eyes.

  “What the—?!” he yelled. I dropped the flashlight. It rolled toward Delilah’s couch, but I dove to the floor as fast as I could and caught it.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” I said, holding the light to my chest. But nobody else said anything. When Cee-Cee started the next record, the apartment door opened. In the hall light I could see Ray Anthony from behind. Then he was gone.

  I couldn’t run out after him like I wanted to. Even if I had the guts, I’d just done something so stupid, what could I have said to make up for it? Suddenly, it all struck me as too horrible to be anything but funny. I wouldn’t worry about it at all until I got home and got some sleep. I reached down and grabbed Cee-Cee’s beer. Finishing it, I tried to imagine what it would’ve been like to dance with Ray Anthony in the glow of the blue light. Softly, I sang into the plastic tumbler, “Baby, baby, come on, come on / Baby, baby, ’cause your love’s so strong.”

  9

  “I’ve got to get Lorelle out of this place,” I heard Mom tell Ben one night. “They’ve damn near killed Louis. I’ll go to jail before I let one of them put their hands on my little girl.”

  This was the beginning of Mom’s campaign to get out of the projects, one way or another. “Moving,” “someplace better” and “getting out” became a part of every conversation she had with us. At dinner, she started as soon as Ben sat down to eat. When he jumped up before anyone else was finished to get away from the table, she told him, “I know you don’t want to hear me talk about getting out of here again. But it doesn’t matter. We are going to, whether you help me or not.”

  I waited until he’d left for work one day and asked her why Ben didn’t want to get out of the projects himself.

  “All Ben can do is count pennies and come up short. That’s who Ben is. But it will take more than not having money to keep me here.”

  Their fights about it got louder and more frequent. She’d accuse him of lying about how much money he had and he’d laugh at her. “Yeah, I’m a liar. A millionaire liar. I got millions, more than millions.”

  I’d wake up in the middle of the night to her screaming at him about it. Once, it got so bad I ran into their bedroom and yelled, “All she wants to do is move out of this shit hole! Why can’t you help her?”

  Mom called out to me, “Go back to your room, Louis. Go back, now!” Ben leapt out of bed and backed me into a corner. He sneered. “She asked me to help her by marrying her. She thought it would help you too. But the two of you do whatever you please, don’t you? Nobody can help either one of you because you both know everything. And what does it get you? If the two of you are too good to live here, let’s see what you can do about it.”

  The next day I apologized to Mom. She told me, “Don’t ruin it, Louis. Don’t ruin what I’m trying to do.”

  Suddenly, she started to change how she talked to Ben about moving, although it was still all I ever heard her talk to him about. She laughed now, as if moving was definite, it was only a matter of time. She flirted with him about how different everything would be when it happened. I almost believed he’d agreed to it, except as soon as he wasn’t around, she was nervous and mean as if all the laughing and flirting was harder work than she’d ever had to do and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep it up.

  She didn’t speak to me much during this time at all except to let me know there was nothing I did that couldn’t have been done faster or better. Saturday morning, after we’d cleaned most of the apartment, she called me into the kitchen for lunch and handed me a ham sandwich.

  “This Friday after school, I’m gonna let you do something special.” I was surprised at how gentle she sounded, but suspicious because for weeks I hadn’t been able to do anything even close to right.

  “You’re going to spend the weekend with your grandfather. I’ll put you on the train Friday afternoon and you’ll come back Sunday.” She was leaning away from me at the table, watching me. “What do you think about that?”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Yes, ma’am” was all I could come up with.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom pushed farther back in her chair. I knew she was ready to explode no matter what I said. I got up from the table quickly so that our eyes couldn’t meet.

  “Nothing, ma’am.” I turned the water on full force, began to wash my plate. She stood and stepped closer toward me at the sink. I kept my eyes lowered, concentrating on sponging the plate, hoping she’d turn away. Finally, she sighed loudly and walked out.

  When I finished, I could feel her waiting for me in the next room. I still hadn’t figured out what else I could say about going to New York, to my grandfather’s. I didn’t feel like I knew him. He was about seventy, I guessed. Mom would call him on his birthday and Ben drove us into the city a few days before or after Thanksgiving and Christmas to see him. The most
I ever said to him was “Hi, Grandaddy, how are you? School is fine,” and then I sat by his window and stared out at 162nd Street until it was time to go back to Stratfield. Mom and Ben didn’t say much more than I did. Sometimes the visits were so short, the drive to New York didn’t make sense. I asked Mom once why she bothered if she wasn’t going to stay longer. She’d rolled her eyes at me. “I certainly hope you figure out the answer by the time I get to be as old as he is.” She invited him to come to Stratfield to spend the holidays with us, but he never did.

  When I asked her about my grandmother, she said, “They weren’t together. It was my father who raised me. I didn’t know my mother until I was as old as you are now.” She looked up toward the ceiling and smoothed the front of her neck. Her hand slid slowly down her chest and into her lap.

  “Did she . . . is she alive now?” I asked.

  “No . . . there was an accident, a car accident.”

  “Was she alone?”

  Mom didn’t answer. It was risky, I knew, to continue to question her. I wasn’t sure we’d ever talk about it again though, so I took the risk.

  “Before the accident,” I asked, “do you remember . . . anything about her?”

  “What I remember most is the first time I saw her. Us looking at each other like strangers and me not wanting to feel that way when that’s exactly what we were.”

  Mom lit a cigarette, even though there was already one burning, dropping ashes from the ledge over the sink.

  “I remember everything we said to each other from that first day to the last. I remember everything.” But what she remembered was private. I understood. I wouldn’t ask her about my grandmother again.

  I decided I would tell Mom that I wanted to go to see my grandfather so she wouldn’t have something else to hold against me, but I didn’t get the chance. When I went into the living room, she was on her knees polishing the couch legs. Without looking up she said, “I figured your being around another man couldn’t hurt. Better than you hiding in your room from Friday to Sunday.”

  During the week, I grew more excited about going away. I’d never taken the train alone. Once I got to my grandfather’s, I probably wouldn’t do anything but homework. The rest of the time I’d listen to the radio or sit looking out the window. He didn’t have a television. Still, it would be someplace different and it was only for the weekend. If I was lucky, I’d get home too late Sunday for boxing with Ben. That alone would make it worth it.

  Friday, Mom insisted on making a tag to pin on me with my name, address and a note that said in case of emergency she should be contacted. Even she thought it was pretty funny after she’d pinned it on my jacket, but she still insisted I wear it.

  “You may think thirteen is a grown man, Louis, but the law doesn’t. If anything should happen to you, nobody would think, ‘Oh well, he was a grown man. Nobody was responsible for him being on that train but him.’ I’m your mother. I’m the one they’d come for.”

  I didn’t know what she imagined might happen, but as I packed, I pictured the train I’d be on in a slow-motion collision. We were on a high bridge above a river. Passengers tumbled through the windows toward the water like rag dolls. The last one to fall was me, the tag Mom made around my neck a weight, strangling me, pulling me deeper into the water.

  • • •

  “Remember to look for your grandfather as soon as you get off. If you don’t see him, stand there and wait until you do.” With her hand on my behind, Mom pushed me up the stairs of the train. I turned and waved down to her on the platform, excited to be leaving her there. “It should take a little over an hour,” she called up to me. Don’t fall asleep or you’ll go all the way downtown to Grand Central Station.”

  She’d made sure I was on an express so the next stop after ours would be 125th Street. Expresses skipped all the little towns in between Stratfield and New York. That way, she said, there’d be fewer strangers on the train with me going into the city.

  It was pretty crowded, anyway. I found an empty two-seater, though, and put my bag down beside me hoping I could ride all the way to New York without anyone in the other seat. I watched Mom on the other side of the rain-streaked window, chasing the train as it pulled away, calling out all the things she’d already told me a hundred times. “Wait in one place for your grandfather to find you. Don’t take off your tag. Don’t talk to anyone on the train except the conductor. If your grandfather never shows up, find a policeman.”

  As soon as the train glided past her and Stratfield began to disappear, I reached up to undo the safety pin that fastened the tag to my jacket.

  “You wouldn’t mind some company, would you?”

  The first thing I thought was how small he was, not as small as me, but no bigger, no taller than David Pecchio, the tallest boy in my class. His cheeks were flushed, plum colored, veiled by a patchy, ragged shadow of a beard. His hair was wet looking and smashed down on his head the way the white boys in school wore theirs, with some of it sticking up in the back like overgrown crabgrass too tough to be bullied by a lawnmower.

  He reached for my suitcase. There was nothing I could think of to say to stop him. He was so short, he had to jump to put it on the rack above us. I imitated Ben’s sneer. Wrinkled-up suit. Looked like gray pajamas. His briefcase was new looking though, like a big leather envelope. Oxblood. That was the color in Ben’s shoebox that Mom told me to shine my loafers with until Ben said I should buy my own polish. Oxblood was what the guy in the wrinkled suit would use on his briefcase if he wanted it to look better than his suit did.

  “Ed. Ed MacMillan.” He held out his hand. It was small and pale and I could tell he bit his nails. They weren’t bloody or disgusting like some nail biters’, but you could definitely tell he spent a lot of time with his fingers in his mouth. I wasn’t real anxious to shake his hand, but I tried to make it strong and look directly into his eyes like Mom taught me.

  “Louis Bowman.” My voice was higher then I’d aimed for.

  “Hi, Louis.” He smiled. He had those teeth where the front four are flat and even and the next two on either side overlap. “I heard your mother back there on the platform at Stratfield. She’s pretty worried about you getting to New York in one piece, isn’t she?” He placed his briefcase flat across his lap.

  I knew Mom had been loud enough for people to hear. Now it felt like she was following me. This was a test to see if I’d disobey her by talking to a stranger so soon after she’d told me not to.

  “Makes you feel like a big baby, right? Like she doesn’t trust you.” He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. It was bad enough he’d moved my bag and sat down when I wanted to ride alone. Now this little white man in the rumpled suit was talking about my mother and me like he knew us.

  “Nothing like your own mother to make you feel dumb. Like she’s forgotten how old her own kid is.” He reached inside his jacket and pulled out his glasses case. He slid his glasses in, then slowly ran two fingers back and forth over the case as if he was reading braille. He put it back inside his jacket.

  “How old are you?”

  He reeked of aftershave lotion. It smelled bitter like lemon mixed with perfume, different from Ben’s blue, Windex-looking cologne that smelled more like witch hazel. I guessed this guy put on so much extra because of the beard. I wondered if it would ever fill in or if he was satisfied with the way it was.

  It might have been easier to talk to him if he hadn’t already brought Mom into it. Now, I thought, no matter what I say he’ll know I’ve disobeyed her. Still, I couldn’t sit there and let him think I was too retarded to even say how old I was.

  “Thirteen,” I told him. Then I turned as much of my body as I could to the window to let him know there wouldn’t be any more conversation.

  “Eighth grade, right?”

  I nodded, not even a whole nod. A half nod.

  “I was the smallest kid in my class when I was in eighth grade, even smaller than most of the girls. A shrimp
. And boy, did they give me a rough way to go. It felt like the whole school was a war zone. I was on one side and everybody else was on the other.”

  His voice seemed almost as high as my own, except he whined. He’d probably sounded the same way when he was in eighth grade.

  “Talk about feeling dumb. You know I just got off the train from New York in Stratfield and now I have to go right back?” Without waiting for my answer, he continued. “I was supposed to study a report over the weekend for a meeting on Monday. So what do you think I leave smack in the middle of my desk? The damn report, of course. Can you believe that?” I liked that he said “damn.” He wasn’t treating me like a kid.

  “I tell ya, this has been some helluva week. My nerves are shot. Look how my hand is shaking. Look!”

  I turned to look at his chewed-on hand, which might have been trembling on its own, but he was obviously exaggerating it. When I didn’t laugh, he let the shaking take over his whole body, his legs outstretched in front of him like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I smiled and shook my head.

  His head fell back as he grinned. Just as quickly, he dropped his hand onto my leg. I jumped in surprise, then looked straight ahead, feeling his fingers squeezing just above my knee. They squeezed tighter, but I didn’t move or say anything.

  “This is an express train to New York next stop one hundred and twenty-fifth street may I have all tickets please.”