I think of when I were sixteen and my neck soft as powder. It still soft now, when I touch it, but the wrinkles so many L. C. finger couldn’t run down the front like it use to, draw from my chin to my chestbone, not pulling hard. My neck darker now, muddy color. I hear the way he breathe wrong, it that time in the dawn when he do that, and I stop. It worse again, like rain, hitting the tin roof on the shed back in the woods, coming in waves and spattering. Forty-nine years and I lay in the bed thinking, long as I touch him, he still mine, and it keep me awake, listening. I keep a hand on his back and reach around with my other hand to feel the bottle. It stay under the mattress, tuck into a hole. They gave him pills at the clinic, to make him sleep. I take two out each time, and now I got eighteen, twenty, but I don’t know if that enough to let me go when I want, when I choose. His breath stop raining in his chest, soon, dry and finish, but not yet, not while I touching him and listen. Next week, when I get more pills, when I know, then it my choosing, when it stop for good. I remember his arm across my chest long time ago, his lips round my ear and then he fall asleep in the middle of a kiss, he so tired. How many years I listen, he always sleep before me, and wake up to call my name.
off-season
ROSA / FEBRUARY
FOR SIX YEARS I had been sitting on hard bleachers watching Donnie play basketball, watching him run until his chest and neck gleamed gold brown like smooth palm tree wrapping. All those years my butt bones got tired, and I slid down to rest them on the wooden boards where feet belong, propping up my thighs on the bench in front of me. Donnie always came up during practice or warm-ups and told me to close my legs because I looked like a boy. Now we were married and I was a wife, so I was supposed to sit normal and put my hands on my knees, knit, or read romance novels like the other team’s wives opposite me, plump and pale, screaming politely when they thought they should.
I wanted desperately to slump down in comfort and figure out why these white boys from the suburbs were beating Donnie’s team by eight, but I slid a little and couldn’t arrange my legs over the bleacher seat because of the bruises. Donnie had decorated my thighs when he threw me around the apartment, put serious rainbow stuff there, first rosy, then purple, and now fading to gold and green. Team colors, Notre Dame.
Since the week before when he did it, I’d been sleeping in the front room on the mattress we called a couch. That morning, I woke up thinking I heard the shiver of the windowpane, the pause and roar of a winter Santa Ana wind at home in Rio Seco, on the Westside. The sun, shining warm on my eyelids, had fooled me into thinking that this was California, but then the wind came through the cracks around the window, icy and silent, and I realized that there were no palm fronds hurling themselves against each other, no eucalyptus leaves to whistle and hold the air. I pushed the shade and looked outside to see the glare of light on February snow, and then heard Donnie in the bedroom getting ready for the game. His size fourteens crashed to the floor after he took them from the closet shelf.
Past the metal railing in front of our second-story door, I could see the long, empty lot that led down to the park where people sold weed in the summer, when we first moved in. The snow was thin over the ground in some places, steel gray the color of trash cans. Donnie came into the kitchen and looked at me. I could tell by how quickly he turned away that he was scared to say anything. Good, I thought, maybe if he’s chicken he won’t do it again. He sat on the folding chair and reached down to jerk his shoelaces tight, the muscles in his arms pulling downward, fluid like silty, dark water. The two tiny marks where I had stabbed him were flat black now, healed over so they could pass for beauty marks. When he’d bent my arm backwards, I poked him with the closest thing I could reach, and two drops of blood like ruby stud earrings stood out on his bicep. He’d been using his hands, his best weapons, and I found mine, the pen I practiced writing sports stories with, the pen with a long, sharp nub.
I pulled on two pairs of sweats, so I could go along, when he came close to the front door. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be with me,” he said.
“Nobody else to be with,” I said. “Only game on TV is Indiana and Northwestern. I ain’t hardly staying here and freezing to watch them.” I stopped at the door, near him, and smelled the sleep on his skin, the little bit of my perfume that was still in the sheets. He looked away, like he couldn’t stand to not touch me, and I smiled. Maybe if he won today, I would feel the same longing I always had, for touching wet curls at his ears, for everyone watching when I did, when I tasted the salt on his skin. The familiar feel of all those eyes on him might make Donnie into himself again.
But these country boys from Middlefield were playing Danny Ainge ball, that scrambly kind full of flying elbows and guys who pretended to fall and then tried to low-bridge somebody. One dude was using his beer belly as a second man to guard James, the skinny forward who had asked Donnie to play in this tournament. We were in a junior-high gym outside Hartford, at the second round of the Middlefield YMCA Tournament.
Donnie’s team was all black and Puerto Rican guys from the city, and when they walked in, everybody looked nervous and started whispering. They hadn’t been playing together but a week, though, and I could tell by the way the other team warmed up that they went way back. I didn’t want to watch a bunch of pink-skinned, raw-kneed guys on TV, but here they were. The point guard was one of those little ones who stomps his feet between the legs of whoever’s dribbling, constantly trying to steal the ball, pushing his eyebrows up all cocky and excited. Donnie had gotten three jams in the first-round game, dunks that everybody had heard about, James said, and the Middlefield crowd loved it now when this guard rogued Donnie’s ball and got a clean, practice drill layup. You could tell their kind: they hated big-city flashiness on the court, which they automatically associated with car theft, annoying rap music, and the loss of their in-dash stereos when they drove into Hartford. Good team ball was the American way, hustle was much better than black and cool, and they’d much rather see one of theirs fall out of bounds for a save than see Donnie do a one-handed slam. “You show that big guy, he’s not so tough,” somebody yelled from the Middlefield ladies to my right after the steal.
“He ain’t about nothin, Donnie,” I said loudly. It was habit. “Come on, box out.” He wasn’t supposed to be the big guy, at center; he was a power forward, and he should have been putting the ball on the floor the way he loved to, hiding in the corner now and then to shoot his old low-trajectory jumper, rebounding better than anyone else. I had watched a hundred times while he positioned himself surely, his hands slanting nervously up and down like fins to guide him in his own part of the water, his long arms fencing out the others behind him. He would sway for a second, his mouth hung in a triangle and eyes rolled upward, waiting for the ball to leap within reach, as it almost always did. It was like he knew instantly from the rotation of the shot where it would fly. But now he backed up in the key and swung his head around to look at the backboard, all wrong, late. Middlefield’s center was old, with a hairy, concave chest and those ancient player smarts from pickup games. He could tell Donnie’s familiarity and ease were gone when his back was to the basket, and I saw him smile again and again. He threw Donnie off with a pinch to the side and snatched the ball off the boards, passing it way downcourt to the cherry-picking little guard. They were up by five a few minutes before halftime.
“Don’t let him get happy yet,” I called out.
“Tell him, baby,” Three said, from the row below me. Three was Donnie’s oldest brother, Charles Morris King, III. “Get back down-court, man.”
“You shouldn’t have kept him out so late, Three,” I said. “Coming home at two, and he had a nine o’clock game.”
“Shit, we was workin, Rosa.”
“First time all week. This on-call stuff ain’t getting it.”
“It’s better than bein at home workin on the truck with Pops. That make you old before your time.” Three looked back at the court. “He gettin tore up. Donnie ain
’t about no center. Look at that gray boy doggin him.”
I always had to smile when Three called people gray. My mother was white, my father light-skinned, and I came out sort of gray, especially in winter, when I didn’t get much sun. Here in the cold, my hands looked see-through and smoky as cheap paper, and my eyes had wells of pencil-colored skin underneath.
When I was fourteen and Donnie had taken me for the first time to see Three, in back of the high school where Three and his cousin Snooter laughingly coerced change from small white students to buy malt liquor for lunch, I could tell by the way Donnie stood still and held his face carefully that he was worried about his favorite brother’s estimation.
“So my brother here tell me your mama from some other country,” Three had said, stroking his chin with two fingers. “You got some exotic foreign blood in you, huh?”
“She ain’t no regular ghostie, cuz?” Snooter said, and the faces around him waited to laugh. I waited for somebody to say “half-breed,” but I heard nothing. I wondered what “exotic” meant to Three.
“My mother’s Swiss,” I said, and Three’s face stretched in surprise.
“Don-nay, man, don’t you know Sweden is where they be makin all them porno flicks and thangs? They free over there! Oh, ho, ho,” he laughed.
“Swiss people are from Switzerland,” I said. “It’s far away from Sweden.”
“Yeah, baby, I was just jokin with you. Check her out, she blush-in,” Three said.
“You better be careful, man,” Donnie said. “She got brains. And a mouth.”
“Long as the brains don’t outweigh the better parts, bruh,” Three said. Each word was separate, like a pronouncement, and when he looked around, they laughed. Donnie’s hand had been wet and cold in mine.
We watched him walk toward the drinking fountain now. “Didn’t you give him no early morning lovin?” Three said, and I was angry when he didn’t even bother to look at me. “He need some of that sweetness to keep his game sharp.”
“Shit,” I said. I was tired of Three being the only reason we’d moved to Hartford after Donnie quit college ball and ran out of money. He’d been hauling trash from construction sites with his Uncle Floyd, listening to Three talk about how the East Coast was live every time he called. All I’d been able to find was a secretary job, and Donnie the part-time guard. Winter didn’t seem live to me. “He need some sharpness in his head.”
“Y’all can’t be fightin, now. You still eligible for the Newlywed Game and shit,” Three said.
I looked at Donnie’s back, bent over while he breathed. “It ain’t a game,” I said. They were beating up on him under the boards because he’d gotten so big. Donnie was 6-5, and the bulk he’d put on during college was still there. He was up to 220. Sometimes I couldn’t believe I held him up when he lay on top of me, but in all our time together, it hadn’t mattered how heavy or light he was, only whether I wanted him or not. When I put my arms around his neck and pulled him down the way I had all those years, the way I had when we first came to Hartford, his flat stomach fit over mine and my ribs had room to fall up and down when I pulled in my breath sharp with love. But now I couldn’t breathe under him, felt only his chest crushing mine and his hipbones against my thighs.
He sat on the bottom bleacher while James argued with the other guys about strategy. Sweat dripped from his chin onto the floor, and his face was glossy and blank. The strategy before had been to get it to Donnie, and at center, he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do. I knew he was going to ignore them and go where he pleased after halftime.
“Man, what up?” Three said. “Why you lettin the old dude make you look bad and shit?”
“Shoot, he got it figured out so he don’t have to run nowhere, just pick off the back and elbow silly under there,” Donnie said. He waited, watching me. He was wondering if I had kept track.
“Ten points,” I said. “Only seven boards.” For years, I had named the number of rebounds I wanted, and I had to pay in kisses. “You’re slow. Why don’t you guys try a backdoor?”
“Shit. With who? Williams?” Donnie looked back at the court. Williams was the other forward. He’d been shooting bricks all morning, even missing two lay-ups.
The third quarter was all Middlefield boys, playing hustle ball, harassing James and kicking passes away, clunking up plays. There was no rhythm, no city ball; they didn’t allow jumpers and trade-off that they couldn’t have kept up with. Donnie got some tip-ins, but the team stayed five or six points down. I saw Donnie coming back up slower and slower, going outside the key and leaving the basket unprotected, trying to fade into the corner. His skin flushed red where it stretched over his collarbone.
At the start of the fourth quarter, Middlefield’s center reached in to try another steal from Donnie as he whirled much too slowly in the key. He poked Donnie in the face. I knew what would happen, remembered how many times he’d said, “They can hit me anywhere they want, bow me and shit, but don’t be messin with my eyes. I only got two.” He popped the center in the mouth, chased him to the corner, his big shoulders rounded like a bear’s with anger and concentration. I had never seen him fight. People pulled him away, and he shook them off, walked to the fountain. “Chill out, D, man,” Three called, and I felt fear rising at the back of my scalp. When he walked back toward the stands, the center laughed and said something I couldn’t hear, but I knew what it was, because Donnie went after him again. I closed my eyes. Donnie used to break up fights, not pursue them with legs stiff as a boxer. The Middlefield crowd was shouting, and after Donnie was ejected and sat on the bench, they stared at his back with disgust and pointed him out to the people coming in for the next game.
Thin icicles had attached the underside of our car to the street like web threads when we went outside. “I don’t want to hear it,” he said, and I waited while he tried to scrape the ice off the windshield. I looked at all the trees. Some had delicate bare branches standing straight up like the piece of elegant coral my mother had found somewhere and kept on the table at home. There were other trees like coaches’ heads, with square-edged crew cuts, bristled and stiff. Everything was black, white, and gray here. I tried to watch the wind blow, but you couldn’t see anything move here. Donnie walked back toward the gym to say something to James, and I saw that the stiff heaps of dirty snow covered anything light, anything that would move. At home, the wind would mean tumbleweeds piled so high outside my mother’s door that we couldn’t open it, and pink pepper berries, ferny leaves and bits of mesh from the palms, ribbons of eucalyptus bark all collected in banks by the sidewalks, in piles behind the cement barriers in the parking lots. And I was always in those parking lots during winter, during the season, at the city college gyms or the convention centers, watching practice, coming early with the team for the games, telling Donnie to watch out for the pick and roll the other team always ran, packing down his hair a little more where it was uneven near his ears. His hair grew faster there.
When we were back at the apartment, I drank bitter herb tea my mother had sent me, something she said was good for stomachaches. Donnie stomped around, hanging his wet clothes outside on the railing, turning on the TV. “Why you gotta drink that stuff?” he said. “It stinks up the kitchen. Why you can’t drink something normal like soda?”
“Soda’s bad for you,” I said.
“Miss Body, the one always got a stomachache cause she so healthy.”
“I got that because of you, fool.”
“Now I gotta be a fool.”
“You don’t gotta be, you wanna be.” That was what we had said into each other’s ears in the dark before. I watched him lie on the bed. “You going to work tonight?”
“They said they don’t have nothin for a couple of days.”
“They never have anything for you any more. You and Three got all kind of time on your hands.”
“You been asked me about fifty times, and I told you it’s slow.” The light from the TV, in the dark bedroom, jumped bac
k and forth, and the glare made his face shift crazily.
I had found a Xerox copy of one of the incident reports the security guards were required to write for each job site. Donnie’s illegible handwriting and secret-code spelling, which only I could unlock, had been circled and someone had written, “This is not acceptable.” I knew, but I wanted him to admit it.
“Why don’t you go find another job, then? Maybe you could chase some lizards out from somewhere.” Donnie sucked his teeth and swung his head around, away from me. “Yeah, remember when you called me and said you found a job. Coach got it for you. ‘I bounce the basketball in the gym, in case any lizards and snakes get inside, so I’ll scare em away.’ Really prepared you for the outside world, huh, baby?”
“Rosa, you getting on my third nerve. I’d look for another slave, okay? Let me get some rest.”
“Yeah,” I said, and then I stopped. I’d seen him back in Rio Seco when he quit school, carrying a small piece of paper in his wallet; he had copied his address from a bill, because when he filled out applications he couldn’t spell Picasso, the street he lived on, or Rio Seco. I couldn’t say it to him. In the kitchen, I picked through a bowl of pinto beans, looking for small stones that sometimes got into the bin. It seemed that every night we ate beans and rice, or raui roesti, the Swiss-fried potatoes and onions I had eaten daily as a child. From the kitchen window, I could see the back of the Puerto Rican restaurant across the alley. Hartford had been an escape, an adventure at first, the crowded streets, red leaves in piles, the good smell of the Puerto Rican food. But now the long tangle of icicles on the black waterpipes wasn’t clear and sparkling; it was milky and old, no longer fascinating. When our car broke down, Donnie had to pay someone to fix it, because he couldn’t lie on his back in the snow. We turned up the heat to 79° on my twentieth birthday, in December. We had read the temperature in Los Angeles in the newspaper, and we wore shorts all morning and laughed. It wasn’t funny when the bill came. We had no family but Three, no one to call when the pipes in the toilet froze, when somebody slashed our tires. We were suckers of the world.
Aquaboogie Page 13