Linden Hills

by Gloria Naylor

  “It’s good and cold, bro—I’ll tell you that. Saw you coming out the Tabernacle. You been praying?”

  “Ah.” Willie stamped his feet to keep the ice from seeping into the soles of his shoes. “You know I was in Harry’s, getting a little liquid fire for my coffee. This time of year brandy’s all you can get to keep you warm. The babes don’t wanna hang with nobody around Christmas who can’t shell up for a gift.”

  “Know what ya mean.”

  “Do you, Shit?” Willie looked at him closely.

  “Sure I do.” Lester frowned. “Hey, I don’t have no job either. They lay off at the factory this time of year.”

  “Them’s some nice threads you sporting on your hands and feet.” Willie nodded at Lester’s thick suede gloves and Western boots.

  “These?” Lester threw out his hands and stamped his feet as if wanting to fling the things off. “It’s an early Christmas present from my mom and sister. Said they might as well give it to me now since it’s so bitter and I’m too damned trifling to buy myself something to keep away frostbite. A nice way to say Happy Holiday to a fella—huh?”

  “Least you got someone to care about whether you freeze or not. It must be nice to have a family in Linden Hills who can afford that kind of stuff.”

  Lester started for a moment and then stared at Willie. “Hey, baby—come out of it. Is this my main man talking? That ain’t caring, White, that’s showing off. See what we gave you? Now what you gonna give us, you no-good bum, you. They gave me this stuff and prayed it would burn my ass every time I wore it. And believe me, if I was a better man and it wasn’t so damned cold, I would’ve left this crap right under their Jesus-tripping, tinseled tree.”

  Willie was silent and crammed his cracked hands deeper into his pockets.

  “I know you’re saying, sure, I’m standing here trembling in a pea jacket and thin-soled shoes and this mother’s talking about turning up his nose at gloves and boots. But I’m telling ya, Willie, it’s torment every time I have to wear this, ’cause it’s less than a week till Christmas and I ain’t got the money to buy them something expensive. You know those type of broads. I’d better not bring in no Woolworth’s perfume and powder set. It’s Chanel or nothing. And I ain’t got no Chanel money, so it’s nothing. And then I’m nothing and they’ve made their point again for another year. Merry Christmas, baby.”

  Willie sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “Guess nothing, why—”

  “It’s not cold enough for you two? You just gotta be out here reciting poetry, even if it’s only to each other.” The man who called to them came up with a young woman pressed against his arm, her body turned slightly in toward his for warmth because the thin beige coat afforded her very little.

  “Hey, Norm, tell it right, baby.”

  “Hiya, Ruth.” Willie was always awed in front of Ruth. He had never seen a woman whose beauty seemed to go down to the bare bone. He saw it pushing out from under her skin to highlight the bronze tinge that the wind put on her smooth, round face, a face like smoky caramel. And her oval eyes, narrowed against the wind, didn’t look squinty like most people’s but positively sexy, as if she was doing that just to make his heart stop. He often dreamed about his friend’s wife, and it was always the same. She was lying on his bed with that golden-brown glow on her face coating her entire body. And he was standing over her, just looking. There was no desire or need within him to touch her, just a heady contentment in watching her nipples and pubic hair all golden and glowing like her face. Then there would be a knock on his door and his mouth would go dry because he knew it was Norman. And Norman would, somehow, manage to come in through the locked door and Willie would say, “I was just looking, Norm, just looking.” And Norman would say, turning toward the golden goddess on the bed, “Yeah, she’s really something, huh, man?” Willie would wake up and wonder why he never wanted to do anything to Ruth while she lay on his bed—just look, as he was contented to do now, a little tongue-tied in front of her.

  “Norm,” Lester said, “if I had a woman like that this morning, I wouldn’t be out here freezing her to death—I’d be at home squeezing her to death.”

  Norman and Ruth laughed, and Willie was disgusted by the cheap rhyme that Lester dared apply to Ruth. She deserved at least a sonnet.

  “Les, it’s all in your mind,” Norman said. “It’s not that cold.”

  “Not cold? Man, it’s cold as a witch’s tit.”

  “Why do you men always apply something bad to a woman? Why can’t it be cold as the devil’s balls?”

  “Aw, don’t come off with none of that women’s lib stuff,” Norman teased her. “How do you know if the devil’s got cold balls, you ever slept with him?”

  “No, but Les has never slept with a witch either.”

  “He did if he scored with that disaster he was dating last month.” Willie found his tongue and was thrilled to see that he had made Ruth laugh, her voice floating high and translucent above their heavier ones.

  “Look, why don’t you joy monkeys come on up to the house and have a little something hot?” Norman offered.

  Lester counted their heads dramatically. “But there’s four of us here. Since when you got more than two cups?”

  The Anderson’s poverty was a standing joke on Wayne Avenue. People said that if Norman brought home air, Ruth would make gravy, pour it over it, and tell him not to bring so much the next time.

  “I’d like you to know that we have three cups.” Ruth smiled. “One each for you and Willie, and Norman and I can share the other one. And we’ve even got the coffee to put in them, too.”

  “And I got the cream.” Willie pulled his brandy out of his pocket.

  “Aw right!” Norman slapped him on the back.

  They crossed Linden Road and entered one of the dilapidated garden-apartment buildings. It was difficult to notice what wasn’t in the Anderson’s apartment because so much care seemed to have gone into what was there. Visitors found themselves thinking, What a nice feeling to be allowed into a home. And it was a home with its bare wood floors, dusted and polished, and with the three pieces of furniture that sat in three large rooms: one sofa in the living room, one kitchenette set with plastic-bottomed chairs on uncertain chrome legs, one bed. Two towels hung in the bathroom side by side with two washcloths folded neatly over them. In all the rooms there were matching colored shades that served for curtains or draperies. Norman took the boys’ coats and hung them over his and Ruth’s on the only two hangers in the guest closet.

  “Wooh, it’s good to be inside. You folks sure get great heat in here.” Willie rubbed his cracked hands together and saw the steam misting on the windows.

  “It’s a wonderful apartment in the winter,” Ruth said. “There’s always plenty of heat. And in the summer when the windows are open, the cross-ventilation is better than air-conditioning, isn’t it, Norm?”

  “You’re right about that.” And Norman went to the stove to put on water for the coffee. The Andersons looked around their apartment as if the warm and cool air that filled up the empty rooms were all that mattered.

  Ruth put three Styrofoam cups on the table, setting the ones in front of Lester and Willie as carefully as she would china. And she gave them each a plastic spoon with a paper napkin folded underneath. Norman poured the coffee and made such a ceremony of unwrapping Willie’s cheap blackberry brandy and adding it to their cups, you might have thought it a rare cognac. And when the two boys raised the steaming coffee to their lips, that’s exactly what it tasted like.

  Their hosts sat there, talking and laughing with such ease that Willie had a hard time figuring out how Ruth and Norman were both drinking from the same cup. Norman would take a sip and talk, and then she’d take a sip. It soon appeared unthinkable that there should be more than one cup between them since they never reached for it at the same time.

  Lester and Willie were careful not to bite into the rims of the soft Styrofoam. They knew the cups were
to be washed and used repeatedly. They would be made to last until Norman got the pinks, when they would be destroyed. Ruth had bought hard plastic cups once, but Norman had managed to splinter those and stick the edges into his wrists. Now there could be no danger of that happening next year—if it was the year for the pinks.

  Looking at him, it was difficult to imagine that this square-jawed man with the gentle, sloping lips was the same one who every other spring went up and down Wayne Avenue, screaming and tearing at his face and hair with his fingernails, trying to scrape off the pinks. He resorted to his teeth and bare nails only after everything else had failed—jagged sections of plates and glasses, wire hangers, curtain rods, splinters of wood once part of a dresser, coffee table, or her grandmother’s antique music box. Up and down Wayne Avenue—in a frantic search for untried edges and textures to dig into his skin—until he was taken away, arms forced and laced to his side, and sent into a twilight that dimmed the shades of his nightmare.

  People wondered why Ruth stayed. They knew she was used to better since she’d once had a husband down on Fifth Crescent Drive. And Norman could never keep a job for more than a year and nine months. And she’d certainly keep no furniture for longer than that. He’d come out of the hospital after three months and usually get a new job within a week, or at the most two. But then a year and nine months later, it would happen again.

  She didn’t stay because every dime he did earn, when he could earn it, was brought home to her; or because he would take her swollen feet out of her waitress loafers, put them in his lap, and rub them patiently for hours; or because the music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul. No, none of that would have kept her there. Because Ruth was a woman who wanted children and that anchor of security which comes with the weight of accumulated things: good brocade chairs, linens, a set of company silverplate. And she came to realize after their fourth summer that she could have none of that with Norman. He would manage to destroy everything that was painfully gathered for almost two years and then awaken from his twilight cry, promise to take his medication, see the psychiatrist, and he would—for each of the seven seasons before the return of the pinks.

  Ruth had gotten tired, past bone-tired, of hurting from being crushed between her hatred and love of this man. Tired of being afraid to have children and of thinking that one spring he just might kill her. Tired of looking into his beaten eyes when he came back from the hospital and saw his life shredded on the floor of their home. She was leaving six winters ago. That year had started off badly anyway. Her ovaries became seriously inflamed, and since there was just no money to treat them, she lost her job at the restaurant, no longer able to lift those heavy trays of food. And the pinks were due again by spring. She phoned her mother who said Hallelujah and loaned her a set of luggage.

  Ruth packed early one afternoon, but the burning in her side forced her to lie down and rest. As soon as the pain lessened, she’d get the rest of her things, call a cab, and go. But Norman came home at two o’clock, eyes red-rimmed and threatening to roll back into his head. He told her that he felt the pinks were coming, and he was lucky this time, he’d been able to leave the plant before the guys saw them clinging to his flesh. God, he was so relieved to have made it home to her.

  Contempt mates well with pity. So Ruth raised herself up in the bed and lashed out against what was driving her from everything that she loved. She was through, did he hear her, through. Because he was a maniac—a fucking, crazy maniac. And she hoped to God that this time he would drive a piece of broken glass through his heart. Then a sharp pain bent her over at the waist.

  Norman saw with concern the tight lines around her eyes and mouth as she dug her fingers into her side and shivered on the bed. Gently, he pulled the sheet over her knotted body, and just as he went to stroke her forehead, he was thrown into another dimension. A wad of pink slime hit him on the back of the hand and moved up his wrist in wet, sucking motions. He cried out and beat his arm savagely against the air. The slime fell to the floor and curled up into a soft ball, but then it began to inch its way back toward his leg. Norman turned to the bed and reached out for her like a bewildered child. “Ruth?”

  She curled up in the bed and moaned.

  Oh, Christ, she was sick. Ruth was sick and those bastards were on their way. He turned to run toward the bathroom and a clammy weight slammed into his neck and slowly clawed its way up to his ears. His skin crawled toward his scalp, trying to escape the consuming mass, as he threw himself against the bathroom sink. His brain screamed, Scrape them off. But Ruth was sick, and he could never stop, he knew he could never stop. The glass of water he’d run splashed over his knuckles and soaked the front of his shirt when he stumbled back to the bedroom. He could smell his flesh dissolving under the pinkish slime that now clung to his chin and throat. The glass tumbled to the bed and what was left of the water seeped into the pillow and sheets. The aspirin poured out of the plastic vial, rolling over his fingers and falling on Ruth’s hair and shoulders. The jellied mucus was now biting into his chest and gnawing at his thighs and groin. The screaming now came from his very being. Scrape. But he could never stop, never stop, so just please, Ruth, take your aspirin.

  Norman rocked by the edge of the bed with his arms clasped around his middle, trying to hold the pieces of his dissolving body together. Large, oily tears rolled down the side of his mouth and dripped from his chin. Did she need another pillow? He could get another pillow. But when he tried, his knees had been eaten away and he only got as far as the dresser and began to sag toward the floor. The screaming was now coming from the bed.

  “Norman!” It was the wail of a woman embracing a nightmare. “Scrape. Them. Off.”

  So Ruth stayed. She let the neighbors wonder, and she offered a mute face to a frustrated and berating mother. She knew it served no purpose to answer those silent or shrill questions—no one would ever believe that she was still there because of some aspirin and a glass of water. And quietly she just didn’t replace the furniture that Norman had destroyed. She removed the glasses and silverware from the apartment. The hangers went next and the metal curtain rods. The smashed television and stereo set were succeeded by a cheap transistor radio since she insisted that she had no use for the clutter of new things; and besides, they were saving for a home. Then every other spring she went to the bank and emptied their account to pay for his hospital bills, medication, and therapy sessions. They filled the vacant spaces in the apartment with the memories from long walks in the park, bus outings to the beach, and window-shopping for that new home; with Norman massaging her back, and her clipping his toenails, with plans for adopting a baby—with a whole, safe year and then that summer, fall, and winter before the next pink spring.

  “So after the dude tells me that, I said, ‘Man, you don’t know how to handle a woman.’” Norman cut his eyes at Ruth. “You gotta put your foot on their necks and let ’em know who’s boss.”

  Ruth sucked her teeth. “Why don’t you stop it?”

  “And then if that don’t work, you put the other foot on it, too.”

  Lester and Willie burst out laughing and looked at Ruth, who was smiling and shaking her head.

  “Now why you sitting here, telling these boys that nonsense?”

  “What nonsense? A man’s gotta be the boss in his home!” And he brought his palm down on the table and winked at Lester.

  “Hey, boss, you forgot to get all the corners when you waxed the floor yesterday. Don’t let it happen again.”

  Lester and Willie hooted through their hands, “Wooh, Norm! She got you cleaning floors?”

  “That’s right.” Ruth got up, went behind Norman’s chair, and put her arm across his chest. “And we take turns making the bed and scrubbing the toilet, don’t we, baby?”

  “Aw, I don’t know about all that,” Norman mumbled.

  Ruth brought her arm up to his neck and forced his head back gently. “Don’t we, baby?”

  “W
ell …”

  Lester and Willie howled.

  “Because what rules in this house, Norm?”

  “I rule in …” He laughed and tried to bring his palm down again, but she tightened her grip on his neck and forced his head back until he was looking up into her eyes.

  “What rules in this house?”

  Norman stared for a moment into the smoky ovals above him. “Love rules in this house, Ruth.”

  She pecked him quickly on the forehead. “You got that right, sucker.”

  Willie’s forehead burned as though it were him she had kissed. And his fingertips tingled at the way her voice lilted up at the word “sucker” and surrounded it with music, the way iridescent bubbles would sound if solidified and bounced against each other. And Norman had that voice all to himself, every day, to call him Daddy or Sweet Bits, or even bastard. What he wouldn’t give to have Ruth just call him bastard, all encased in bubbles like that. He bet Ruth could even say “motherfucker” and make it sound like a prayer. And it seemed so unjust for that voice to belong to a man who ran through the streets tearing at his flesh.

  “See how she pushes me around?” Norman stroked the hand on his chest and appealed to Willie, who only nodded curtly. Suddenly, he didn’t feel like clowning anymore. “She’s even got me painting this apartment twice a year. I told her that the paint’s gonna get so thick on these walls it’ll push us out of here.”

  “I like change.” Ruth looked around at the walls. “I’m already thinking about something new for January.”

  “Why don’t you try pink?” slipped out of Willie’s mouth, and the look Ruth gave him over Norman’s shoulders crumbled his heart. Norman looked down into his coffee cup, and Willie glanced at Lester for help, but his friend seemed to have disowned him.

  “No,” Ruth said, looking straight at Willie. “That’s a good color for bathrooms, but I had something more like a pale green in mind for the kitchen.”

  “If you do that, Ruth, I’m never coming back in here,” Lester said. “My mom’s got that whole damned house done up in green. I asked her what she’s trying to do—get that guy on the can of peas to marry Roxanne ’cause it looks like nobody else will?”