Before, After, and Somebody In Between

by Jeannine Garsee

  I slam into my room and grope under the windowsill for the key to my trunk. So what if I’m like my dad? My dad was smart. He even went to college for a while down in West Virginia, till he hooked up with Momma who never made it past the ninth grade.

  I dig through my cluttered trunk till I find my latest journal. I keep all of my journals in here, plus old report cards and birthday cards, and a few old toys I can’t part with. Lots of photos, too, but none left of Daddy. Momma slashed them all up during one of her drunken frenzies.

  Once, when I was little, we were all riding in the car, and I remember passing an old factory. Thick, pure white smoke poured out of the stacks, and I poked Daddy in the back to point it out. “Look at the clouds!”

  Daddy said, very seriously, “Yep, that’s a cloud factory, honey. That’s where God makes all the clouds.”

  Wow! I stuck my head out the window to get a better look, but then Momma had to ruin it with, “Don’t lie to the kid, Ray. She believes every word you say.” To me, she added, “It’s smoke, sugar pie. Nothing but dirty old smoke.”

  But when Daddy winked at me in the rearview mirror, I knew the truth: that Momma was wrong about the clouds, and this would be just our secret.

  Times like this, I really do miss my dad. He’s the one who got me hooked on Beethoven. He liked to play classical music in the car just to drive Momma nuts. He played it at home, too, on his violin, till Momma put an end to it.

  I stare at the blank page of my journal, but no way can I concentrate. All I’ve done today is fight, fight, fight. I’m utterly sick of it, and Jerome is right: I’m always running my big mouth, always pissing people off.

  I lock my trunk back up, stash the key, take the screen off the window, and scale the rickety fire escape. Jerome’s sprawled on the bed, his nose buried in Romeo and Juliet, and I can hear Bubby snoring in the crib. That other kid, Mario, is nowhere around.

  I scratch on the screen and whisper, “Hey!”

  “What?” he grumbles without looking up from the book.

  “I take it back, okay? I had a really sucky day.”

  He drops the book into his lap and turns his head to the window. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “You wanna get us killed?”

  “I’ll be quiet. I swear.”

  With a dramatic sigh, Jerome crawls across his bed to unhook the screen. I jump over the sill, plop down beside him, and point to the book. “I can’t believe you’re reading this already. We’ve got, like, six weeks.”

  “I don’t like to wait till the last minute.”

  “Duh, I can read it in one night. Are you always such a grind?”

  “You always such a stuck-up bitch?”

  “Are we always gonna end up fighting like this?”

  “Probably,” he admits, but at least now he’s smiling.

  6

  While Miss Fuchs races through attendance the next day, Shavonne shoots me a note from three rows away: Come over after school, k? Knowing that today has to be better than yesterday, I send her a thumbs-up. I relax even more when I notice that old Blubber Butt, happily, seems to have lost interest in me. A couple of homeroom homies harass me off and on—Ma-a-artha, yo, Ma-a-artha, hey boo, gimme some sugar, baby!—but at least they’re nice enough to keep their hands to themselves.

  At lunch, Shavonne and I sit with Kenyatta and Monique. Kenyatta’s dark, tiny, and smart, with straight black hair hanging into her eyes. Monique, on the chubby side, even flashier than Shavonne, acts like an airhead, but still, she’s sweet. I’m just glad I don’t have to eat alone in this freaking cafeteria. Food flies through the air, fights break out every minute, and the music’s so loud you have to scream to be heard.

  When they announce over the PA that there’s a music assembly last period for anyone interested in joining the school orchestra, Shavonne slams down a fist. “Alri-i-ight! Let’s bail!”

  I blink. “You mean cut?”

  They break into hysterics, and Kenyatta whaps me on the back. “Girl, you gonna be hangin’ with us, you better get your shit together fast!”

  “My shit is together, and I’m not cutting. Anyway,” I say loudly over their shrieks of laughter, “maybe I want to go to this thing.”

  “Eew, what for? It’s or-ches-tra!” Shavonne taunts.

  “So what? I like classical music. I listen to it all the time.”

  “You?” Shavonne hoots, and adds as I glare at her, “Well, you don’t look the type to me. More like…” She pauses, then lets out a shrill, “Yee-haw!” that makes Kenyatta and Monique laugh even harder.

  “Hey!” I snap, hugely insulted. “For your information, my dad had a violin. He taught me how to play it when I was, like, five, okay? And I was good at it, too.”

  Shavonne smirks. “Heh, this I gotta see.”

  “Well, you can’t. I don’t have it anymore,” I confess.

  “Why not?” Monique asks from behind her compact, dabbing a lung-clogging dose of powder on her greasy nose.

  All three wait expectantly for my answer.

  “My mom burned it,” I finally admit.

  “She burned your violin?” Kenyatta says in disbelief. “Why?”

  “Oh, she was pissed at my dad about something, so she took some of his stuff, threw it in a barrel, poured gasoline all over it, and tossed in a match. She burned the garage down, too,” I add carelessly, wondering, how secretly twisted do I have to be to utter this story? “The fire trucks came and everything.”

  “Wow,” Shavonne says in wonder as they all sort of look at me with new respect. “Remind me never to fuck with Martha’s mom!”

  Monique speaks up as she twists open a tube of scarlet lip gloss. “Well, my mom burned my head with a curling iron once. Gave me a bald spot for a year.” Shavonne hurls a half-eaten muffin at her head, and I laugh, really laugh hard, for the first time in days.

  Miraculously, Shavonne agrees to come with me to the assembly. We sprawl out in the top bleachers of the gym while the orchestra plays something I actually recognize—“Spring” from The Four Seasons. This is the first time I ever heard it played by real people, and the orchestra sounds great, not what you’d expect from a bunch of kids. High-pitched violins shoot out notes so rapidly, I have no idea how anyone can move their hands that fast. The lower-pitched cellos draw the rest of the music together with a deep, soothing hum I can feel deep inside my chest.

  “Wow,” I whisper, glancing sideways at Shavonne who, already bored, saws at the tips of her gem-studded talons with an industrial-sized emery board. Rubbing away goose bumps, I lean as far forward as I dare without falling out of the bleachers, hypnotized by the stunning sounds below. As the last notes fade away, it strikes me without warning, a mental explosion of truth: Maybe I can do this, too!

  Shavonne looks up long enough to eye me nervously. “You gonna puke? ‘Cause you look sick to your stomach.”

  My limbs spring back to life. “I’m doing it!”

  “What? Wait—”

  But I’m already halfway down the bleachers, knocking my way through the crowd. Violin, violin! I wish I could fly over the crowd and be the first in line, because—yes, yes, yes—I know this could be me!

  But by the time it’s my turn, like a hundred kids have already picked the violin. So Mr. Hopewell, grand pooh-bah of the string section, falls all over himself trying to dump a cello off on me.

  “No fair,” I moan. “I used to play the violin.”

  He squints, reminding me of Dr. Huxtable from The Cosby Show with his craggy dark face and lame checkered sweater. “You took lessons?”

  “Um, no, but—”

  He holds a cello up hopefully, and I think: that big clunky thing? Then I start to remember those low, spooky notes, and cautiously reach out to touch a string… plunk! And that one single sound, so warm and so beautiful, sends a jolt up my spine, smoldering my brain stem and rippling the skin on my arms.

  Never mind Mr. Hopewell’s speech about how
playing an instrument is a major commitment, blah, blah. Never mind when he says it costs like twenty-five bucks a month to rent one. By the time that note from the cello string has quivered off into thin air, I’ve made my mind up.

  Shavonne shakes her braids. “Girl, you off the hook. That thing’s bigger than you.”

  “No. It’s perfect.” Now if I can just figure out a way to wring some money out of Momma.

  After school, I head off to the projects with Shavonne. Her building, sprayed with graffiti and unnervingly dark in the hall, reeks like a toilet, so I guess she wasn’t kidding about the junkies. Inside her apartment, though, everything’s bright and colorful, not at all what I expected.

  An ancient fluffy cat, purring noisily, rubs her chin on the toe of my shoe. I love cats, but Momma’s allergic, and Wayne would probably use the poor thing for target practice.

  “That’s Josephine. She’s even older than me.” Shavonne dumps her books and grabs hold of my wrist. “C’mon.”

  Josephine chases my shoelaces as I follow Shavonne to her room. It’s bigger than mine, and she has her own TV with every cable station on earth. One big worktable, cluttered with art supplies, and a tall wooden easel take up most of the space.

  I study the paintings and drawings that decorate her walls. “Man, these are awesome! You oughta go to art school or something.”

  “I know,” Shavonne says smugly. None of that aw-shucks stuff for her.

  We play around with her makeup and jewelry and hairpieces, and spill our guts with music videos blasting in the background. Shavonne’s dad is dead, too, and her mom cleans for some rich family in Shaker Heights. All this makeup and stuff was given to her by her cousin Rodney, a professional drag queen who’s halfway through a sex change and now insists on being called Rashonda.

  Well, I can’t beat the Rodney story, but I do tell her about Momma and how she’s missing a few stars from her Lucky Charms. We’re having so much fun, I don’t even look at the clock till Shavonne’s mom rolls in after work, and by then it’s seven thirty. “Oh, man. I gotta go.”

  Mrs. Addams, a shorter, sourer, skinnier version of Shavonne, shakes her head when I tell her where I live and shoves a couple bucks into my hand. “Child, I know you ain’t walking home by yourself in this neighborhood.”

  So, wedged next to a sleepy, smelly old lady on the overcrowded bus, I ride to the end of my street, fingering an imaginary bow, plucking invisible strings, and humming snatches of The Four Seasons under my breath.

  What’s funny is that the raggedy lady hums along with me. Every single note, exactly in tune.

  7

  At school, Chardonnay remembers I’m alive, and calls me “bitch” or “ugly girl” whenever she sees me. To be perfectly honest, I’m not the only person she picks on, but, unlike Shavonne, I’m too much of a wuss to fight back. Who wants a ballpoint pen drilled through their eye socket?

  But now it’s Friday night, start of Labor Day weekend. Wow, no Blubber Butt for three glor-i-ous days! Wayne fires up the grill in the driveway for barbecued chicken, and the cool evening air smells fresh and autumny. I haul my boom box to the garage and play “Hound Dog” over and over till Wayne makes me change over to some stupid hillbilly music.

  Wayne’s in a surprisingly jolly mood and doesn’t seem to mind when Jerome shows up with a pot of baked beans. “From my grandma,” he announces, cautiously handing it over to Momma.

  “Well, ain’t that sweet of her!” Even Momma sounds cheery for once, considering how she’s been moping around here for the last few days. “Why don’t you ask her to come on down? We got plenty of food. Right, Wayne?” Like she has to check with him first.

  Wayne shrugs, poking at the chicken with a giant fork. “Hey, the more the merrier.”

  Now this makes me suspicious because, as far as I can tell, Wayne never hangs out with the Lindseys. I’ve never heard him say one nice word about them.

  “Um, thanks,” Jerome says, equally wary. “But my grandma goes to bed kinda early these days.”

  We load up our plates to a roaring Garth Brooks, and I mouth Shavonne’s Yee-haw! when I see how Jerome cringes. We’re not the only ones who don’t care for this hillbilly soundtrack, either, because a few seconds later an upstairs window grinds open.

  “Turn that shit off!” Aunt Gloria screeches down.

  Wayne bellows back, jabbing the barbecue fork at the house, “Don’t you tell me what I can do in my own friggin’ backyard!”

  Well, Aunt Gloria proceeds to tell him where he can put his own friggin’ backyard, and Wayne tells her what she can do with her own black ass, back and forth, back and forth, till Aunt Gloria gives up and slams the window shut.

  “They do that a lot?” I ask Jerome as we head wisely for the front porch.

  “Huh, all the time.”

  I see a bearded, shriveled old man with missing legs rolling his wheelchair along the curb. He waves feebly at Jerome. “Y’all seen my dog? Seen Ole Marvin ‘round?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Washington,” Jerome calls back, sinking his teeth into a chicken leg.

  “Who’s that?” I whisper.

  “Luther Lee Washington. He stays drunk all the time.”

  “Maybe I’d stay drunk, too, if I didn’t have any legs.” I wave my own dripping hunk of chicken. “You want something to eat, Mr. Washington?” He just looks so sad.

  With a shake of his grizzly head, the old man pushes off on his wheels. “Naw, thanks, baby. Think I’ll keep on lookin’…”

  “Pitiful,” Jerome comments around a mouthful of meat. “That old one-eared dog of his been dead for a month. Got run over downtown.”

  “Didn’t anybody tell him?”

  “You wanna tell him?”

  “Well, no,” I admit. “But isn’t it kinda mean to let him go on hoping like that?”

  “Maybe.” Jerome sucks the last bit of meat off a greasy bone before tossing it over the porch rail. “Or maybe not.”

  The music in the backyard switches over to “Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” and I can hear Momma and Wayne just a-whooping it up by the garage.

  “Oh God, I can’t stand this,” I wail softly to Jerome.

  “Aw, c’mon. They just having a good time.”

  “Yeah, well, if it was your mo—” I snap my lips shut in the nick of time. No point in bringing up the fact that he doesn’t have a mom to boot-scoot down the driveway in full view of the whole neighborhood.

  Anthony picks that moment to stroll around the corner of the house, all baggy pants and dangling chains, his hair twisted in tight rows from one end of his scalp to the other. “Yo, JoMo, my man! Hangin’ with the white chicks now?”

  Jerome stops chewing, but stays silent.

  “Mind your own business,” I suggest, hoping I sound tougher than I feel.

  Anthony sends me a dark, dangerous smile, then jams his hands into his pockets and swaggers off—probably to the Eagle Deli at the end of the street where all the rest of his future convict buddies hang out.

  “JoMo?” I poke Jerome with my elbow.

  Jerome finally swallows the chicken. “It’s like a street name.”

  “You mean like a gang name?”

  “What do you think?” he demands, rolling his eyes.

  “Well, you’re not in his gang… are you?” I ask suspiciously, even though the idea of Jerome in a gang is funnier than hell. Kind of like trying to picture Sister Mary Shavonne taking her final vows.

  “I ain’t in no kind of gang,” he insists, highly offended.

  We rock on the squeaky glider and devour the rest of our food while inventing gory, creative ways to annihilate Chardonnay. As the sun begins to sink over the telephone wires and rooftops, sending soft slashes of lavender and pink across the sky, we gather up our trash and wander to the back of the house where we find Mario crouched on the steps, a tear-streaked Bubby squirming on his lap.

  “Where you been?” He thrusts the baby at Jerome. “I’m sick of watching this kid. I got stuff to do, m
an!” And he takes off down the driveway, swaggering like Anthony.

  “Damn. I was gonna study,” Jerome says with a hopeful lift of his eyebrows.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll take him.” I hold out my arms and Bubby climbs into them happily. Jerome, with a grateful glance, rushes up the back steps and into the house.

  “Ba-ba-ba,” Bubby babbles, snatching my glasses off my nose and jamming them in his mouth. Yikes, just what I need. I shove them back on, then swipe a hunk of chicken from the cooling grill, shred it, and feed it to Bubby one piece at a time. He gobbles it up like he hasn’t eaten in days, but I know that’s not true. Jerome takes good care of him when he’s not in school.

  We plop down into the overgrown, weedy grass where Bubby pulls at my ears and my hair and jumps on my stomach. The music is low for a change, something soft, old-fashioned, and kind of yodely…oh yeah, Patsy Cline, out a-walkin’ after midnight, in the moonlight, yada, yada—and Momma and Wayne sit together in lawn chairs, their hands entwined, heads close together. Momma sees me and waves, and I wiggle my fingers back. Even Wayne sends over what could possibly pass for a smile.

  It hits me then how truly happy Momma looks, a whole lot happier than she’s looked in a long time. Cheeks pink, crispy yellow hair bouncing in the breeze, her toothy smile bright and beautiful. Wayne slings a tattooed arm around her shoulders as she takes a dainty sip from a can of Pepsi, and then leans into him, giggling, as he whispers something in her ear.

  “Ba-ba-bah!” Bubby insists, lunging for my glasses again.

  I catch his arms and hug him tightly, breathing in his sticky, barbecue baby scent. He squirms and squeals and finally settles down, growing heavier and heavier till he conks out cold. I stretch him out in the cool grass, his head warm on my lap, and watch the sky turn colors, the moon grow bright, the lights blink on in the surrounding windows. Just listening to the music, and wishing like crazy that this one single night could go on forever.

  8

  Momma stays in her jolly mood all weekend, which, strange as it sounds, is why I don’t mention my cello. Nothing sets her off like asking her for money. But by Tuesday morning I’ve put it off long enough, and of course she stares at me like I’ve suddenly sprung an extra head. “Twenty-five bucks a month! Where am I supposed to get that?”