Sunday You Learn How to Box

by Bil Wright

  Louis,

  Remember. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you have to say.

  Never stop yourself from saying it.

  Your friend,

  Eleanor Davis

  I sniffed the note. It smelled like hand cream.

  • • •

  When it was time to leave, I went outside and stood on the porch. Every day since I’d talked to Ray Anthony about Burgess, I thought he might come by maybe, to pick me up. The day Dr. Davis told me she was going away, I actually waited for him, as though I knew for sure he was coming. Then I decided to walk to Blackburn Avenue to the Sunoco station to find him.

  The sun was sliding down behind the office buildings in the middle of town. The farther I walked in the opposite direction from the bus stop, the colder I got. When I got halfway down Blackburn Avenue, near the Sunoco station, I stopped. I didn’t want Ray Anthony to see me. I wanted to watch him while I decided whether to go over and let him know I was there. I stood there, shivering, trying to figure out whether he was in the garage or inside the station. If he was on some kind of errand he hadn’t taken the truck, because it was right there in the lot. There was an older man who I guessed was Ray Anthony’s boss. He’d go in and out of the station and eventually I saw him go into the garage. When he came out again, he locked the door so I knew Ray Anthony couldn’t be inside. I got closer as it got darker. I realized I must’ve been standing there almost an hour. Where was Ray Anthony?

  Maybe he got off already, I thought. Or maybe he didn’t have to work today. The older man got into a beat-up station wagon and started to back it out onto the street. When he passed me, I made sure I got a closer look at the man who’d hired Ray Anthony and saw him so much more than I did.

  I stared at the empty Sunoco station and the truck Ray Anthony said he’d drive through Burgess if I needed him to. Maybe he’d lied. Maybe he didn’t work at the station at all. Or maybe he’d been fired. Maybe Ray Anthony was the liar. liarsneakliar.

  Wherever I thought I was going, I was going alone and no one was going to come driving through any buildings to give me a ride.

  It didn’t matter. I still wanted to see him. His red, fuzzy hair and pointy shoes. His chipped tooth and the space in between that I’d stopped trying to imagine filled in. I wanted to see Ray Anthony Robinson. Even if I never said it out loud, I wanted to begin saying good-bye.

  21

  Ben died the week before Christmas in his green Pontiac. The radio was playing “Jimmy Mack” instead of “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” He had a heart attack while I was punching him, shouting I hated him, I wanted him to die. I never expected that he really would.

  After the ambulance took the body away, Mom and Lorelle and me went back to the apartment. Mom stopped in the kitchen, and stared into the sink. She picked up a dishrag and started scrubbing down the refigerator door like she could see dirt on it that no one else could.

  “Mom? Mom, you’ve still got your coat on.”

  She kept washing around the handle, using her fingernail to scrape a patch of dried jelly. Suddenly she stopped and went to the hall closet. She took off the grizzly, threw it onto the closet floor and kicked it into a corner. Then she went back to the refrigerator, scrubbing in circles the same places she’d just left shining.

  That night, she carried Lorelle into my room in the dark, whispering to her, “We’re going to sleep with Louis, just for tonight.” But she didn’t sleep. She sat up and smoked cigarettes till she finished the pack. Then, she smoothed the blanket over her thighs for hours with a juice glass of scotch as if she was ironing a deeply wrinkled skirt.

  • • •

  She came back from shopping for Ben’s casket the next morning and told me, “I did the best I could. It’s not exactly top of the line, but it’s not like I had top-of-the-line money to work with either.”

  She explained she’d been shown a range in price and style she’d never expected. Oates, the undertaker, had taken her through a house with two floors of coffins on display in the black middle-class section of town.

  “It’s where the man lives!” she whispered, sinking into the couch like we were watching a late-night horror movie together, “and the only room I saw that didn’t have a coffin in it was the front office.”

  She tucked her legs under her the same way she told me and Lorelle not to when we sat on the couch. “Well, all I can say is we won’t have to be embarrassed or feel guilty either. Jesus only knows what would have happened if it had been me. The man would have put me in a cardboard box and never looked back.” I knew she wasn’t talking about Oates, the undertaker.

  • • •

  I didn’t see what Mom had to choose from, but the deep brown box we sat in front of together at Oates Funeral Parlor looked respectable enough to me. Mom didn’t remember Oates showing her the room where he’d put Ben, in front of a fake fireplace with wallpaper that was supposed to look like brick. In between people coming over to her and paying their respects, she leaned down to me and said, “It just shows you how crazy I must’ve been. He had to have said this was where the viewing would be. All I can remember are the rooms with those damn empty coffins and the big yellow price stickers on them like it was Sears.”

  People kept coming into the room where we were and realizing they had the wrong wake. The whole time Mom looked like she was either studying for a test or taking one, I couldn’t make up my mind which.

  • • •

  She must have been freezing at the funeral. Instead of the grizzly, she wore a thin, navy blue spring coat over her new gray suit. The grizzly was the warmest coat she had, but I could tell she wouldn’t have worn that if it was the only coat she had. After the funeral, she said she thought sure she’d caught pneumonia, but she didn’t talk about why she hadn’t pulled the grizzly out from the bottom of the closet.

  I didn’t see the veil until we were ready to leave for the church. It looked like the ones Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King wore, except when I looked at Mom in hers, it was like looking at her through a screen door. If she never wore that veil again, I’d remember how it fell like a black cloud onto her shoulders. And her eyes, lined and shadowed under it, because she wanted to make sure people could see them through the cloud. Miss Odessa came to the apartment before we left for the church and said about a million times, “Girl, you don’t have nothin’ but some class. Leave it to you to look like the president’s wife.”

  The church was almost full, but there were mostly regular members who came out of respect more than anything else. Ben didn’t have any other family and I’d heard Mom tell Grandaddy on the phone it wasn’t necessary to make the trip. She’d hired a baby-sitter for Lorelle, so it was just Mom and me sitting in the front row staring at Ben’s coffin. Mom was half hidden to everyone else. I was the only one close enough to see her face under the veil. I wanted my own veil, one that was long enough to cover my whole body.

  When the service was over, we got up and followed six men rolling Ben’s coffin on a metal carrier to the door of the church. As we got into the funeral parlor limousine, I wanted to ask Mom if I had to get out again at the cemetery or if I could wait in it until she was through and then ride home. The wooden box was spinning around and around in my mind, planting itself deeper in my memory. I didn’t want to add to what I’d already never forget.

  But I stood beside her at the gravesite anyway. I stared at her through the veil and she murmured, “It’s alright. It is.” I wasn’t sure she was talking to me, but I listened anyway and said it back to her in case she needed to hear someone else say it.

  • • •

  Miss Odessa tried to come back to the apartment with us to cook dinner, but Mom made it clear she didn’t need her to do anything for us. She actually stood at the door and didn’t let her come in, saying, “If we need anything, I’ll call you. I promise.”

  Mom sat at the kitchen table. Lines I’d never seen before moved from her forehead to around her mouth. I felt helpless
to do anything except give her some privacy. I started upstairs, but she called out to me, “Don’t lock yourself in that room, Louis. I have to talk to you.”

  She sat across from me at the kitchen table with Lorelle half asleep in her lap. “I’m sending you to your grandaddy’s till it’s time for you to go back to school. I have enough on my mind without having to worry about your craziness. I don’t want any more trouble.”

  Now? I thought. Why? What about Christmas? Am I supposed to sit in New York on my grandfather’s couch staring out the window on Christmas while he sits in his room fixing old radios?

  I went upstairs to the bathroom. Locked the door. Walked over to the bathtub in darkness and got in, sitting with my back to the faucet. Closed my eyes. Don’t tell anybody, Louis. Promise you won’t tell anybody. On top of everything else, you’re a liar. A sneak and a liar. Don’t tell anybody. Promise you won’t tell.

  “Louis!” She was running beside the train. “Louis!” She was at the foot of the stairs calling me.

  Now it was clear to me. This was the time. I wasn’t coming back from New York. Mom said herself how black kids disappeared off the face of the earth and nobody seemed to give a damn. There was one kid from the Stratfield Projects people still talked about. To hear Miss Odessa tell it, his own parents were sure everybody concerned was better off.

  “Louis!”

  Don’t tell anybody. Promise you won’t tell. I wished I’d known in enough time to tell Dr. Davis. Merry Christmas, Dr. Davis, I’m going away. At least I’d wished her a Merry Christmas. She’d know one day that Merry Christmas really meant good-bye.

  I opened the bathroom door. Mom was already halfway up the stairs.

  “What were you doing in there? Why didn’t you have the light on?”

  “Nothing. I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “I told you. No craziness. Come downstairs and sit with me.”

  I started downstairs and stopped. I’d forgotten something.

  “I’ll be down in a minute.” I ran back up to the bathroom. Turned on the light. Grabbed my towel and wiped my footprints from the inside of the tub. Black kids disappear all the time. Don’t tell anybody. Promise you won’t tell.

  “Louis. This is the last time I’m going to ask you. What are you doing up there in the damn bathroom?”

  “Nothing. I’m not doing anything.”

  I turned off the light and started downstairs again.

  “I’m coming, Mom,” I called to her. “Here I come.”

  22

  She said it was raining bullets, but it was really only drizzling. It was the kind of rain you can barely see from your window but once you’re in it, wraps itself around you until all you feel is wet. Mom slammed out into it with Lorelle to buy lunch meat for me to take to New York. She was annoyed because I said I couldn’t go. I told her I wasn’t packed yet, but I really needed the time alone to sneak more stuff into my suitcase. It didn’t take me that long, because when I thought about it, it didn’t make sense to make it too heavy. It was better not to take some things than to have to throw them away later on because I couldn’t carry them.

  It was the first time I’d been alone in the apartment since Ben’s death. The whole time I was packing, I kept imagining he was in the next room.

  Mom still hadn’t slept in their bedroom alone at all. Lorelle would ask if she could sleep in Mom’s room and Mom was still bringing her into mine. I thought if Mom was that scared she might change her mind about sending me to New York, but I guess she figured after I was gone there’d be more room in my bed for the two of them.

  I took my suitcase downstairs and put it next to the door. Being downstairs didn’t make me stop thinking about Ben being upstairs so I put on my jacket and went outside. I went over to the courtyard. With my face turned up into the rain, I counted eighteen rows of windows. There were twenty across. I stood in the middle of the courtyard and said to them, “You keep your eye on the center ring. Watch Louis Bowman disappear.”

  I walked back to the apartment, got a dish towel from the kitchen and dried my face with it. I smiled, thinking how Mom would have strangled me if she’d caught me. Then I folded it neatly and hung it back over the sink.

  Sandwiching myself between the front door and the screen door, I waited for them. When they came around the corner, before Mom could say anything, I yelled out to her, “Just wanted to make sure I was ready when you got here!” I grabbed my coat and pulled the door closed behind me, locking Ben in.

  At the bus stop, Lorelle asked me if she could go to Grandaddy’s too, then she asked Mom. Mom didn’t answer. She looked relieved that I was leaving. Having me around was probably like looking at the grizzly. A reminder, but one she couldn’t easily kick into the corner of the closet.

  When the bus came, I kissed Lorelle and as I got closer to Mom, I saw how streaked her makeup was. Different shades of brown running from her forehead to her chin. Her face is always wet, I thought. She’s either sweating or crying or there’s makeup raining down her cheeks. I wanted to dry her face like I’d dried my own, to tell her, “It’ll be alright now. I’m leaving. No more sweating, no more crying. No more.”

  She didn’t run alongside the bus yelling any instructions. I made a picture for myself of her standing there with Lorelle holding on to her under a black umbrella that used to be Ben’s. I took my picture fast. I didn’t look back again until I was pretty sure she’d started walking in the other direction.

  But she never moved. Ben’s umbrella was hanging at her side open, catching rain. I could still look into her eyes.

  Go home, Mom, I whispered. It’s alright, now. He’s gone and so am I. You can go home.

  23

  He had to have been at the station, or at least on the platform, but I didn’t see him. Not until I was already on the train with my suitcase on the seat next to me, hoping no one would sit down. Maybe I didn’t see him because I was thinking about my suitcase being too heavy for me to carry around for very long. Or because I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t get off in Harlem at all, but stay on until Grand Central Station where there were more people and it would be easier to disappear in the crowd.

  “You doin’ some travelin’, huh?”

  It was Ray Anthony Robinson. As many times as I’d thought about him, I’d never actually seen him anywhere but the projects. It was strange to see him outside them.

  “I’m going to New York,” I said. I couldn’t tell him I wasn’t coming back.

  “Who you know in New York? You goin’ for Christmas?”

  Ray Anthony pulled my suitcase off the seat and lifted it to the overhead rack. He twirled the toothpick between his lips with his tongue and made this laughing sound in his throat. “Who’s gonna carry this shit for you once you get there?”

  He sank into the seat next to me and threw his feet up on the one across from us as if it was his living room couch. He had on maroon shoes, patent leather with pointy toes. His jacket was leather too, short and curved in at the waist like a matador’s. It smelled like vanilla extract, maybe because it was wet.

  “My grandfather lives there.” It was all I could get out. I sat there looking at him sideways, trying to think of what else to say. I wanted to tell him something that sounded important, something he’d remember if he never saw me again. While I concentrated on that, Ray Anthony folded his hands across his stomach, tipped his hat down over his eyes. I watched as he appeared to nod off to sleep. His stomach moved higher then lower, the corner of his mouth shining each time his tongue brushed over it. When the conductor whined, “One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street next stop,” I still hadn’t made any decision about what I wanted to tell Ray Anthony or whether I should get off in Harlem or not.

  I leaned closer to him and took a deep breath. I could still smell his jacket. It hadn’t dried. “I might be staying here. I might not be going back.”

  He lifted his hat, slid it farther back on his head and turned to me slowly. I thought he might be mad because I
woke him up. He looked at me so hard I moved back in my seat.

  “How come?”

  I didn’t know how to answer, so I shrugged.

  “Your mom’s sendin’ you away?”

  I looked out the window. We were already in Harlem. I decided at that moment to get off. My grandfather would be waiting on the platform. I looked back at Ray Anthony. I wanted to wear his maroon patent leather shoes and his leather coat. What it would be like to step off the train as somebody so different from Louis Bowman?

  “You got a piece o’ paper?” he asked me. He stood up and shook the wrinkles out of his purple pants, except there weren’t any.

  “In my suitcase.” I reached for it, but he beat me to it. I couldn’t have gotten it down by myself anyway. Inside, on top of everything else was the blue book with blank pages Dr. Davis had given me. I’d clipped a pen to the first page. I handed my book to him.

  “Whatcha got in here?” He laughed and I stared at his chipped front tooth. I watched him leaf through the empty blue book and thought, if it was anybody else. Anybody.

  “Nothing’s in it,” I told him. “I just got it.”

  Ray Anthony unclipped the pen and wrote, covering the whole first page. The sleeve of his jacket was so tight it looked like he had leather muscles. He held the book open and pointed to what he’d scrawled. “This is my mom’s apartment, you know, where I stay.”

  I pushed the book into the suitcase quickly and kept my hand there so he wouldn’t see it shaking.

  The conductor called again, “One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street.” People around us were starting to get up and move down the aisles.

  I nodded toward the window. “That’s my grandfather.”

  Ray Anthony blocked me from getting to the aisle. He stood with his legs spread apart like he had that day behind the bushes, only this time he had both hands on his hips, holding his jacket open.