But the house they arrived at wasn’t white and blue. The place was painted a dull yellowish-brown, the color of old ginger cookies. Santos cursed when the van stopped. Sister Pamela turned and gave him a harsh, but brief, look. She also seemed concerned about where they were. Freddy told himself not to worry. For a robot, there was no such thing as an unwanted surprise.
“This is it,” the driver said, scratching underneath the brim of his cap. He showed Sister Pamela the address written on a piece of paper and then pointed with the same thick finger to the number on the door. “This is definitely the place where I drove the other Sister.”
After a heavy breath, Sister Pamela told the boys to sit tight, then got out and shuffled between the ugly hedges toward the house. Before she got there, a woman emerged from behind the front door. Freddy knew right away that the woman couldn’t be Mrs. Johnson, but he wasn’t aware until she appeared that he had still been holding out hope.
Against the protests of the driver, the boys slid open the heavy door and poured out of the van. They stood in a group on the sidewalk, and Freddy moved away from everyone’s groans and whispered complaints, closer to the house so he could hear what Sister Pamela and the woman were saying. The woman was black, no different from him. Her skin was the same dark shade as his. She didn’t seem like a maid or anyone else who would work in a big house in the suburbs. She looked older than his mother, but healthier, and wore a dark floral-printed robe that went down only to the middle of her broad thighs. The straps of her pink sandals matched the little shocks of color on her nails. Her eyes hid behind a large pair of sunglasses, and whenever she raised and lowered her arm, thin silver bracelets shimmied down her wrist. Her shoulder-length hair had been set and curled in a fancy way. It shone like hair he had seen in TV commercials, much nicer than his mother’s had looked in a long time. Otherwise she could have been one of his neighbors in the South Bronx, the kind of woman his mother, in her ugliest moments, would call a bitch and tell him to avoid. The only thing unusual to him about these women was the way they dressed, in clothes that looked very expensive. Whenever he saw one of them in the elevator, it seemed like a mistake. He wondered where they went all day in their nice clothes. He wanted to ask why they didn’t know where they were.
Freddy got even closer to the house. “Ain’t no mistake here, Sister,” the woman said. She was loud like his neighbors too. In response, the comments of the boys behind him rose above whispering. Sister Pamela looked back at them sternly before she resumed the conversation, asking about the man of the house.
The woman nodded and said, “But he’s away, on business. He goes away on business a lot.”
Then Sister Pamela mentioned the Johnsons.
“Yeah, just like you say. Him and the Johnsons go to the same church.”
“Your husband, you mean?” Sister Pamela said, her voice rising.
“What are you asking?” the woman cried. “Hey, I got religion too, Sister!” She leaned to the side and stretched her neck to look at Freddy and the others. “Anyway, these boys here,” she said, “they might as well be my own sons.”
Before letting them inside, the woman lined up the boys shoulder to shoulder and made them repeat their names until she could recite each one. She paced in front of them, cooling her sweaty face with a handheld fan, and got irritated at herself the few times she confused one boy for another. Freddy’s hands began to stiffen like metal when she stopped in front of him and stared through her dark glasses. After a few moments she smiled and guessed his name correctly. “My name is Arlene,” she told the boys, “but if you want you could call me Mrs. Clinksdale.”
The inside of the house was like a bigger version of the apartment where Freddy lived: couches covered in plastic, a bible on the coffee table, a big wooden spoon and fork hung side by side on a kitchen wall. In one way it was even worse: there was no TV. The boys took turns with the bathroom on the first floor. As Freddy waited, Sister Pamela stared at an image on the wall. He was the last to go in and change his clothes. On the rim of the tub, he found bottles of the same pink lotion his mother used to moisturize her hair.
Back in the living room he stood alone, fidgeting in his swim trunks. He held his elbows tightly. He’d had similar feelings at home. A few months ago, his mother had let in a maintenance man while he sat watching cartoons, wearing only his loose Superman underwear. She’d allowed him to walk right past and stare at Freddy’s body. That man had been the first visitor to set foot in the apartment in a long time, and no one else had been there since.
The other boys were already out by the pool. With his telescope vision, Freddy could see them through the sliding glass door. He felt reluctant to join them and further ruin the picture he still held in his mind, but he didn’t like the sensation of having driven an hour from home only to arrive at a bigger version of the same place. Before he went outside he told himself there was still a chance it could all turn out great.
But the pool was small, a plain rectangle of cloudy water, and it didn’t have a slide or diving board. Several boys, in up to their chests, splashed each other or bobbed around, already shiny with play. Between the pool and the house, dingy umbrellas on rusted white poles shaded a few circular tables. Sister Pamela sat at one of them with her hand pressed to her mouth. She yelled for order once in a while but no one paid her much attention. Arlene stood behind her and smiled at the boys in the pool, a hand resting on the left hip of her avocado-shaped body. With her other hand, she fanned herself. She wore a sun hat now, also pink, and the fake-looking straw of the brim drooped over her face. As her head turned from boy to boy, her lips formed soundless words. Freddy had seen his mother do something like this as she wilted into sleep.
“All right, everybody,” Arlene announced. “I’m about to get these burgers and dogs on the grill!”
“What?” a few boys said. They looked at each other in confusion and then fixed their pleading faces on Sister Pamela. It seemed this wasn’t how things normally went.
“You know,” Sister Pamela said, “we arrived at your home only a short while ago.”
“My fault for not having the grub ready when y’all got here,” Arlene said.
“But it’s ten thirty, Mrs. Clinksdale. Not even that.”
“Who you telling? I know. We get peckish around here if we don’t have lunch by eleven. Have you seen how skinny these pups are? Look like they haven’t had a decent meal in weeks. Can’t have that, not in my house anyway.”
She went into the house and brought out two pitchers of lemonade. Next came uncooked hot dogs and fat-laden patties of beef on an aluminum tray. A few yards from the two tables stood a small grill. It looked cheap and was hidden by a low-hanging tree branch and a tall growth of hairy-looking plants. Freddy got closer. The grill was electric, not charcoal like the ones he’d seen some white families using at Van Cortlandt Park. Arlene, humming with pleasure, began to cook, but the backyard didn’t fill with the flavor of fragrant smoke. Freddy wasn’t hungry at all, and he could tell the other boys weren’t either.
Freddy hardly ate the sides of mustardy potato salad and microwaved kernels of frozen corn. He didn’t even like steak, but felt disappointed that there wasn’t any. The boys were done with their food before eleven thirty, but Arlene said they should wait an hour or else they’d get cramps. Sister Pamela pressed her lips together and then said she was certain that was a myth.
“Can’t take chances,” Arlene said. “Plus it’s so hot out today.”
“Is it?” Sister Pamela replied. “Last week was hot. It feels nice today.”
“Says you. Anyway, can’t take any chances with our children.”
The boys remained around the tables for that hour, not even snacking from the bowls of greasy potato chips, afraid of extending their forced idle time. Aside from a few minutes of fun, they had been sitting the entire morning. Arlene hummed again as she cleaned up. Before she was done, she exhaled and began to mutter, asking herself where she had put her wat
er bottle. As she looked around, her shaded eyes met Freddy’s—he felt them lock onto his, felt her regarding him.
After the hour was up, most of the boys began playing again, but Freddy wasn’t interested. He drank a glass of the tart lemonade and then walked around to the far edge of the pool, where he crouched and slid his hand into the water. It was lukewarm, like used bathwater, and smelled strongly of chlorine. Santos waded over, pushed himself up, and sat next to him. He lifted his goggles onto his forehead and slowly kicked underwater.
“This sucks,” he said.
Freddy didn’t want to admit it, but it was true.
“Those hot dogs? The worst.”
“The burgers too. Everything.”
“And the pool. The deep end don’t even go past my chin. What kind of deep end is that?”
“Nothing’s what it’s supposed to be like.”
“Sucks,” Santos replied. He kicked faster, his feet breaking the water’s skin.
“How did this even happen?”
Santos shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”
“You said it was a big white house. You said there was a slide and a garden and animals in the bushes.”
“Animals? What are you even talking about?”
“You told me,” Freddy said.
“I heard her say Scarsdale. Scarsdale always means the Johnsons.”
Freddy glared. “Why’d I even listen to you?”
“Me? It’s not my fault!”
“There probably isn’t even a real Mrs. Johnson.”
“There are a million Mrs. Johnsons,” Santos said. “They only brought us here so you wouldn’t get all excited and jumpy and piss yourself like a baby.”
“Don’t call me a baby.”
“You are a baby. Your mother stopped raising you as soon as you were born. Everybody says so.”
“Liar!”
“Call me a liar again,” Santos dared.
Freddy curled his shaking hands into fists. They felt solid, heavy, and strong. “You’re a liar and you smell like garbage and that’s why nobody else ever hangs out with you.”
Fear made him hit Santos then, as if this act would somehow erase the startling violence of his words. But smashing a fist into the side of Santos’s head didn’t help the way Freddy had hoped. Instead he found himself tangled up with his friend, arms and legs knotted and flailing as they both fell into the pool. A rush of warm water poured into his mouth, and it tasted like bleach. His left knee scraped against the coarse pool wall. Santos elbowed him in the stomach and Freddy’s eyes flew open to the murk of the water, ribboned with gray-green strands. Santos kicked wildly to right himself, forcing Freddy to inhale more water and open his eyes even wider so that he saw the shadow and substance of the other boys in the pool. When he felt other hands on him, he reached his toes for the bottom. His head broke the surface and he found himself gasping and spitting where he stood, with shouts swirling around him, his stung eyes attempting to blink away the world.
Arlene had pulled him from the pool. With a towel wrapped around her still-wet body, she listened as Sister Pamela scolded them, then interrupted and ordered the boys to shake hands. Santos seemed sincere when he said sorry, but Freddy didn’t even make eye contact while muttering his apology. He didn’t so much shake the offered hand as nudge it away. “Well, forget you then!” Santos yelled. Arlene got upset. She started to scold them much worse than Sister Pamela had, then stopped and touched her face. She shook her head slowly and mumbled that she was feeling dizzy. After a moment she said, “Maybe I should lie down for a while,” and went inside the house.
Sister Pamela said the boys’ punishment was to sit for the rest of the afternoon, at two different tables, and watch the others at play. She perched herself on a chair between them to prevent any more fighting. When Sister Pamela wasn’t looking, Santos caught Freddy’s attention and silently imitated an ugly sobbing child. His eyes weren’t red, but Freddy could feel that his own were. He drank more lemonade, kept his gaze fixed on the sweating glass as the crescents of ice within it melted.
What Santos had said about Freddy’s mother wasn’t true. She’d been good at raising him once, at least as good as the white mothers he saw on TV, the ones who made steak for dinner on Friday nights. When he was a smaller boy, she taught him that the world was a huge bear, but that you could beat it if you imagined you were bigger than you really were. She would tell him you could always do more than you thought you could, and she lived that way, finding money to pay for things they needed when it appeared impossible, helping distant cousins and aunts, and even neighbors sometimes, when it seemed she wouldn’t even be able to provide for the two of them. But that was before Ava, his mother’s sister and only real friend, got so sick.
As the boys played tag in the pool, Freddy picked an old scab on his knee. After considering what would be best now—maybe the wizard or the angel—he imagined again that he was a robot. Robots didn’t cry or feel lonely. It didn’t matter at all to them if a pool had a slide or a diving board, or if a disappointing lady served overcooked burgers instead of steak. Robots didn’t care about the difference between a Mrs. Johnson and a Mrs. Clinksdale, and they didn’t care when their friends told lies. They didn’t feel achy chests or sick stomachs, and for them, sitting all afternoon next to Sister Pamela wasn’t a punishment. It was just a fact.
When Freddy’s mother told him Aunt Ava probably wouldn’t get better, that this was one of life’s meanest bears, she hadn’t yet lost her attitude about being strong in the world. She kept Freddy away from Aunt Ava, getting someone to watch him while she made her visits to Newark. Before leaving and when she returned she said hopeful things about her sister that Freddy found confusing, given what had to be true. Since she said them so often, he asked, and then begged, to go visit as well. She gave in and brought him along one day, less than two months before the funeral would be held. When they arrived he was scared by how thin Aunt Ava was, by the shadows and hollows that had replaced the fleshy sections of her face. Freddy’s mother looked scared too, as if this face and this body weren’t at all the ones she had seen the previous time. Her complaints to the doctors and nurses went ignored, so all she could do was hold her sister’s hand and direct the force of her attention there, slowly rotating the rings now loose on Ava’s fingers. That visit, in that room, would form the first of Freddy’s many memories of his mother crying, shaking as if very cold, and during the train ride back to the city he kept waiting for her to reshape her lips into a smile.
Freddy intended to sit by the pool until it was time to change clothes and leave, but he had to use the bathroom. He kept telling himself that robots didn’t have to use the toilet, didn’t have to worry about holding it in. Still, the feeling got worse. Unable to endure it any longer, he stood and said he had to go. As he walked toward the house, Sister Pamela watched him with hard eyes, her face taut with frustration, but she didn’t try to stop him. Instead she tried to quiet Santos, who was laughing at Freddy, and then she shouted at some boy misbehaving in the pool. No one paid any attention to her.
Santos’s laughter followed Freddy into the house. When he came out of the bathroom he explored the first floor. He searched for anything interesting, something he could show Santos to make him jealous, or make him beg to be friends again. He tried a door that might have led to the basement but it was locked.
Above the couch in the living room hung the image Sister Pamela had been looking at earlier. It was a framed painting of a brown-skinned man with thick dark hair and a full beard. A faint light encircled his face, and he gazed gently skyward. It took several moments before Freddy realized that it was supposed to be a painting of Jesus. This was mysterious. He’d seen plenty of these images—one hung in the hallway of his apartment—but never a Jesus who wasn’t white. He looked behind him, and felt both relieved and sad when no one was there. He didn’t want to be caught, but he also didn’t want to be the only witness to what he was seeing.
Outside, Sis
ter Pamela was still shouting at the boys to listen to her. Freddy stood at the foot of the carpeted staircase. Was a black Jesus different from the other kind? Was he easier to talk to? What kind of person would even have a black Jesus? What else did she have? From where he stood, it appeared very dark upstairs, even though it was daytime.
In the cartoons and movies, robots could see through walls and across long distances or sense a body by its heat or detect the smallest thing that was wrong. Freddy tried to open himself in this way, as he did when his mother locked herself in her room or stayed out at night a lot later than she said she would. He made a map of what surrounded him: Santos laughing and Sister Pamela yelling out by the tables, the other boys getting wild in the pool, the basement behind the locked door, the mysteries upstairs. He listened for the glass door sliding in its track and for Sister Pamela calling his name, but heard only the continuing shouts and laughter. Then came something from upstairs, a small and familiar sound, a cough that was also a moan, a tiny cry.
He thought about ignoring it, as he did with such sounds at home, and was close to just going back out by the pool. But what was the big deal? He was already in trouble. Who knew what would happen when his mother found out about the fight? If she cared, she might not sign the permission slip next time. She might not allow him to go back to St. Rita’s at all. The map in his mind told him there was some danger upstairs, but he wanted to be brave, not afraid and always wondering about what he hadn’t done. He put one foot on the first carpeted stair and was surprised how easy it was then to go up the rest of the way.
A Lucky Man Page 7