by Ed Pavlić
The smoking player held both arms extended straight out to either side. His lighted lighter in one hand, glowing cigarette pointed upward and pivoting to follow the movement of the ball in the other. Obscured by her angle of view, Ndiya saw the flame and the glow from the tip of his cigarette while the rapt, stationary player traced the flight of the shot as it moved beyond the apex and began to pick up speed. It looked as if something impeding the ball’s progress had been removed from in front and placed behind to push it on its way toward the rim of the hoop which, Nydia now noticed, had a long net of tinsel stars and sequins hanging down from it. She’d seen basketball courts. She’d never seen one with the net hanging down almost halfway to the ground. This hoop looked more like one of those West African crowns worn by kings to obscure their human faces while they performed supposedly divine duties.
Most of the courts she remembered in Chicago either had chain nets or no nets at all. Her brothers had always had their own nets that they took with them and brought home when they were done. Just then it dawned on her that the net-thing had something to do with the question of touch. Her brothers had always discussed “touch” like it was some mystical attribute possessed only by gurus. She didn’t know what that was about, but she knew her brothers sometimes had to fight in order to leave the park and take their nets with them. For a few summers, they and their friends had talked about it ceaselessly, as if it was an issue they should submit to the UN. Finally, she asked them what they needed nets for anyway and they all turned to her at once and froze. Six boys with exactly the same look on their faces, and no one moved and no one said anything. She turned and walked away, at which point the cursing and revenge plotting resumed.
■
Ndiya stood there revising what she knew about the physics of basketball and thinking how none of this strangeness boded well for her evening. One of the old men on the picnic table turned around and yelled, apparently at her,
–Miss, would you mind and please tell Mrs. Clara to tell Melvin that a shot’s about to go in?
Exactly then the other old man interjected,
–No it’s not!
He didn’t take his eyes off the nearly stationary ball. The first man turned to him:
–Yes it is!
Then he turned back to her:
–Would you mind and see does the boy want to come and watch?
And she did. She minded. It seemed like it’d been two lifetimes since she’d minded someone. She minded him back up the block feeling like she was moving on a sidewalk that was itself moving almost fast enough to get back to where she came from if she kept on minding. She hadn’t even thought about which way to go or to make sure she knew who Mrs. Clara and Melvin were. She was just minding.
When she reached the old woman and the tsunami boy, they were packing up the yarn and needles and boats. Ndiya mustered,
–Ma’am, Mrs. Clara, ma’am, the gentleman down the, er, down the alley, I mean in the park?, a gentleman down there would like to know does little Melvin here want to come and see the, ah, the shot go in, or, or not?
Mrs. Clara looked up at Ndiya as if they’d known each other for life:
–You hear that, Melvin? Now go on. This nice young lady, what’s your name honey?
–Ndiya, my name’s Ndiya, ma’am.
–Yes, yes, I see. Well, Melvin, you go on with Miss Kneed-in-the … you just go on and see does the shot make it in the net tonight or doesn’t it, OK?
Mrs. Clara handed Ndiya a small backpack. Melvin moved his goggles up to stick above his eyebrows, this pushed down his brow and seemed to make his whole face frown.
–OK, Nana.
Then he raised up his hand and, taking Ndiya’s:
–Let’s go!
Ndiya turned, holding little Melvin’s hand. She heard Mrs. Clara charge,
–You mind now, Melvin, you hear?
And so, Melvin minding Mrs. Clara to mind Ndiya minding an old man on a picnic table, the both of them sloshed and squashed back to the opening of the alley and up to where the two old men sat concentrating on the shot.
–You all just made it, won’t be a minute—
At which point the other old man said,
–Bet it will!
And the first continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted,
–before Nesta out there makes his shot and Lee Williams, right here, loses another quarter to yours truly, Lucious Christopher.
Lucious Christopher extended his hand and Ndiya, feeling like she was still minding, introduced herself,
–My name’s Ndiya. Ndiya Grayson.
–Grayson … Grayson. Lee Williams, you ever known any Graysons?
Lee Williams, eyes drilling the floating ball, answered,
–Used to know some Graysons from visiting my cousins down in Greenville, but that’s a long time ago.
–Don’t mind an old man’s lack of manners.
Lucious Christopher said, gesturing to the bench in front of them,
–Young lady, have a seat.
And, then, a light tap on her shoulder.
–Ah, beg your pardon there, er, you don’t mind me saying, but you a little old for swimming on the block there, Miss Grayson. You should go on down to the beach.
Lucious Christopher and Lee Williams looked at each other with the all-knowing, we-best-watch-this-one look on their faces. Ndiya’s face heated up as she ignored them. She had a spinning-dizzy feeling like she was a ball of string that was being very quickly unspooled.
And then Lee Williams:
–Grayson! Yes, Lonnie and Lucky, old Clem and them—but that’s all I can get back, it’s been a long time.
Lucious Christopher:
–Is that right? I knew a Lonnie and a few Luckys, can’t recollect they last names, but now you mention it, years back, didn’t one of them Grayson ni—well, brothers—take up with a fine young woman who got herself one of them new apartments off in The Grave? Then, remember there was that crazy thing with—
Lee Williams cut him short:
–Don’t know. Like I said, they was Greenville ni—I mean, brothers—when I knew them. Now, hush while I sight-guide Nesta’s brick on toward the hoop in such a way that it don’t do a “Chocolate Thunder” on Junior’s backboard.
Ndiya sat, stunned, thinking, this is not happening. Melvin immediately climbed into her lap to wait for the shot to go in or not. While helping Melvin change out of his boots, she welcomed her thought: “This might not be happening, but it’s certainly going to impede the dreaded conclusion of my evaluation of date number two.”
Wrong again. As they watched the ball gain speed on its way down the slope toward the front of the rim, Ndiya heard the faint sound of a piano from above the court. The music sounded like it curled around itself in circles of differing speeds and radiuses. In wide, slow sweeps cut by faster, tighter arcs, the first note of each phrase was loud and clearly audible. The notes that followed faded until they almost weren’t there at all when a new phrase began somewhere else, loud at first and fading as if it curved away. It sounded like the piano rode the curve out of earshot. Then, there it was, come around again. It sounded to her like wheels inside wheels.
From time to time, the phrase would start with a note sung by someone and once in a while a few notes would be sung inside the phrases. She’d just noticed it, but Ndiya guessed that the music must have been there all the time because, now that she did hear it, the players’ movements seemed to follow the phrases. They didn’t all follow each phrase, though, nor did they move for the complete audible length of the brief, arc-like tunes. Nonetheless, now that she’d noticed it, the music provided a cadence that held the scene together. Up close, it all seemed less like the baseball diamond inside ripe nighttime and more like she was watching through the thick glass of an aquarium. Movements behind that aquarium glass had always made Ndiya slightly nauseous so she closed her eyes to steady herself. This was a very bad idea.
Upon closing her eyes, Ndiya felt like she�
��d been lowered headfirst into the music coming from a window above the alley. Instantly, the whole of date number two flashed through her body and behind her eyes as if it had all happened in about twenty seconds. It didn’t move like her memory; the fluid thing washed over her body in one piece like if you watch a wave pass overhead from beneath the surface of the water. She felt the pull of its weight draw over her and move through her at the same time. She saw herself standing immobilized at the Violet Hour window watching the SnapB/l/acklist folks toasting Maurice at a large table to the right of the bar. Maybe it was the way that window framed the scene? Or being home in Chicago? She didn’t know. In that window she’d seen clearly for the first time the vast distance between herself and these youngerish, blackified, professionalized peers. The distance had always been there, she’d insisted and depended upon it. But she’d never opened her eyes and stared at it like this. “Hope it works,” she whispered, either to them or to herself. She had been leaning toward the window. Her face was close enough to the glass that her breath clouded the surface. Suddenly a cement-like certainty seized her. There was no way she could get through that door. At least it seemed like they hadn’t seen her, she thought. But she knew that she didn’t care what they’d seen. She didn’t know what to do.
A new note sounded a new phrase from above the alley. Ndiya saw herself turn away from Maurice’s birthday party and enter the bar next door. She’d leave the bar after half of an Elton John song and two drinks. “Two Blue Labels, please, neat,” she heard herself say.
She’d said it immediately upon reaching the bar, without knowing why or waiting for the barman to approach. She didn’t realize that she’d repeated verbatim what Shame said seconds after the thing with Malik’s house-arrest bracelet. So, we could say she called him up. In the space of about thirty seconds, she downed the brown contents of both tiny glasses, thinking the liquor was too soft to be considered liquid. Then she looked in disbelief at the bill, eighty dollars? Without a pause she placed five new twenty-dollar bills in the black leather folder and left. The price of “whatever the hell Blue Label was” echoed around. It contended with what little she’d assumed she’d known about Shame. International laborer in some local 269 or something? Joycelan Steel-something-something? What was that?
Then she thought, “And here I am soaking wet, sitting on this bench with a little boy in my lap and Shame’s whole block’s high? My whole life’s high?”
Before she could turn toward the southbound bus stop in her memory, the music faded away and a new note punched through the air over the alley. The note brought the scene from date number two to her eyes like the whole thing was a movie on a screen in the alley playing for everyone to see. It wasn’t really in her eyes, of course. It was worse—the physical scene was on the loose in her body:
Shame on his cycle pulling up to the opposite curb. He waves and takes off his helmet, staring at her. She sees herself nod. His U-turn through traffic. The ride. Helmet smell. Sun on scalp. The drinks in her arms and pools of heat in both heels. Song by a long-lost, one-hit group, Surface, in her head. “Happy.” Shame’s toe popping the bike into higher pitches around corners and the pop into a low growl when the road was straight. Oh, you coming right over? Beautiful, baby. Diagonal park. Worn boot heel. Kickstand down exactly onto a small square of wood nailed into the gutter.
Then stoop.
Inside, steps.
The sound of twilight joins the memory wave to the present. Shame’s back on the piano stool. Drowning.
This music. The same music she’s hearing now.
Phrases, broken circles. Splices. Zoom lens. Her fingers strum Shame’s ribs beneath his extended arms while he plays. Four up, four down. A scar-notch in his skin, two fingers wide on left rib number three. Shame plays. The Surface song in her head, Only you can make me.… The voice in her head, just then, going under, Ndiya has left the building … far below the surface. The stool spins. He turns around but the music continues. Shame’s hand Shame’s hand on Shame’s hand on her back. Up under her shirt. Her sudden panic that he’ll touch the scars. That he’ll stop. That he won’t. That he’ll ask. That he won’t. How he both does and doesn’t. The music doesn’t pause, moves from the past to the present and back. Notes fall and stick to her like an April blizzard blown through a fire escape. Her head turns toward the ceiling. The open Y of his thighs narrows against her legs. Her body overhead. The room in her mouth with a voice of its own.
She woke up on the floor. Midway to the bathroom, she paused on tiptoes and turned back to look. Shame laid out immobile on the rug like a crime scene. After she nearly stepped on it barefoot and a stack of books tumbled over, she slammed a thick hardback volume down on a huge, glossy, black spider. The spider hadn’t tried to run. Ndiya had a moment’s sense that it may have turned toward her just before the book smashed to the floor. She stood up and read the title of the weapon from above: Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis. She left the thick tome there on the floor, covering the murder.
■
Ndiya forced her eyes open as the shot hit the net and bright rain sparkled out from the tinsel and sequins. Melvin raised both hands and said,
–Boo-ya!
Lucious Christopher:
–Lee Williams, the ever-if-only-from-time-to-time-sermon-iferous, I say that’ll be legal tender the equivalent of one American quarter, or do I put it on your tab?
And Lee Williams stood up and stretched his back:
–Let it ride.
The players chanted “On and on and on and on.” The ones against the wall raised up their hands and called out, “Like a—say what?!” And the chant repeated. They all began to move toward the other end of the alley. The three against the wall got up and joined them as they walked south toward Sixty-Fourth Street. Ndiya saw that it was the young woman’s arm they had been staring at on the side of the court. As they walked away, the woman held it out in front of her and each player bowed and kissed the underside of her forearm. Ndiya noticed that the extended arm was multiple shades lighter than the woman’s other arm.
At least that’s what it looked like to her and, “At this point, why not?” she thought. Melvin looked up at Ndiya:
–Could you take me back to Nana, now?
Tingling in the music, Ndiya realized that most of her was still back on date number two. She shook her head to get Shame’s fingers off her spine and replied,
–Ah, yes, let’s go.
Though she had no idea where to go. She stood up to go somewhere. Lucious Christopher said,
–If you can’t find Mrs. Clara, just take Melvin up to Shame’s with you, Ndiya Grayson. We’ll tell the old bird to come get him when we see her but she’ll probably check there first herself.
Ndiya, minding, nodded in silent disbelief.
As she stood up with Melvin’s hand in hers, she felt like she’d been off the bus and on that bench for hours if not days, maybe years. But she knew it hadn’t been long because her shoes and skirt were still soaked. And it was still twilight. She knew very well that all of this was crazy: “Dripping wet, the whole damned neighborhood’s high, Melvin, Mrs. Clara, Lucious Christopher, and Lee Williams who seemed to know where I am going, to say nothing of where I’ve been, better than I do?” She knew it was crazy somewhere, but it didn’t feel crazy here which, she knew, too, made it all the crazier. Melvin looked up to her and said,
–I’ll take you to Shame’s house.
With a security wall of hard-won tricks and tactical anger beginning to fail and leaving a person she barely knew exposed, Ndiya walked with Melvin toward 6329. If nothing else, she knew it was within easy earshot, whatever that meant. At the very least, she thought, it meant Shame lived nearby.
■
When she turned toward whatever was nearby, Ndiya encountered a memory that had been following her around for days. On the morning one week after the house-arrest night, she sat alone at her sublet’s drop-leaf kitchen table with a bowl of oatmeal. She re
played the triangle of Shame’s reaction to Malik’s busted bracelet. And before that, there they were in the street outside the party on the Fourth:
–Where do you want to meet?
–I don’t know, neutral corners? OK?
–Fair enough; I know just the place.
She sat at the kitchen table, crossed her legs, and felt herself slip as she corralled the last pool of melted butter and brown sugar into her final lump of oatmeal.
She couldn’t decide. So she paused with the bowl in her left hand, elbow on the table, the spoon held in her right. She uncrossed and reverse-crossed her legs and felt herself, again, as her legs moved over each other into the new position. As if she’d snuck around the back of her self and looked in the window through the split in the curtain, she thought, “Ndiya, my girl, that’s different.” Fear followed the pleasure. “That was a date all right,” Ndiya thought, and looked at herself in the window. She nodded in the moment and planned to deny everything later.
She balanced Shame in her memory like the spoon in her right hand. Sugar melted into the tiny veins in each swollen grain of oatmeal. The final bite was light brown, sweet and perfectly hot. She thought, “Last bite in the bowl, perfectly hot and the first bite hadn’t burned my mouth. Is that possible?” She glimpsed 9:15 on the clock as she figured the possibles or not of a perfectly hot, honey brown, last bite of oatmeal in the bowl. “Improbable, at best,” she thought. Fifteen minutes to get dressed and get on the 9:30 bus to work. “But possible?” she weighed the one thing against the other.
Her eyes narrowed, she stared at her reflection in the window. Her bedroom door ajar, its reflection hovered like a dare above the street behind her reflected face. “Yes, OK, it’s possible. It’s also possible that I’ll get the 10:30 bus and Ms. Yvette Simmons”—she’d just begun to think about Yvette-at-work’s actual name—“can do like this,” she said to her double. A thin blade of anger flashed. She knew it was her fault, not Yvette’s. She decided not to care, took a deep breath and puffed her cheeks into her best Dizzy Gillespie in the window until a laugh burst out and fogged the glass. She turned and, in a bright rain of descending minor thirds, Evelyn King chimed her brain. She left the bowl where it was on the table, sing-whispered, All the way down, and walked back to her room. Just then a heavy pendulum swung suspended from a long wire and for a slow moment Ndiya’s body came near, then closer, almost within her reach.