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by E. Lynn Harris


  Mama wasn't in a how-can-I-help-you-today kind of mood. “You want a psychic? Then you need to call one of them stupid-ass telephone services and waste your money to hear what you want. I only got one thing to tell.” Then Mama told her what her specialty was.

  But the woman didn't run away, and she didn't look scared. She just made her eyes narrow and stared at my mother like she couldn't quite see her. “Are you telling the truth?”

  “I ain't got time for lies,” Mama said.

  “Then I want to know. How much?”

  The price is usually twenty dollars for people Mama likes, a hundred for people she doesn't. She asked this woman for twenty, exact change. You always have to pay first. That's the rule. Then Mama makes you sit across from her at the card table, she takes an index card from her pile, and she scribbles a date in pencil, just like that. She doesn't have to close her eyes or hold your hand or whisper to Jesus. It's nothing like that at all.

  “Now,” Mama said, holding the card up so the woman couldn't see what she'd written, “I'ma tell you from experience, this ain't the best time to look at this, not right now. Some folks like to go where there's lots of light, or nice music, or where you got somebody you love. This ain't nothin' to share with strangers. That means me, too. Save it for when you're ready.”

  But when Mama gave her the card, the woman held it in her palms like a shiny seashell and stared down, not even blinking. I saw her shoulders rise up, and she let out a breath that sounded like a whimper. I wished she'd listened to Mama, because it makes me feel bad when people cry.

  But this woman, when she stood up to leave, she was smiling. A smile as long as a mile. And this time, when she walked past me, she pressed her palm against my cheek. She made me smile, too.

  When she was gone, Mama clapped her hands twice and laughed. “Look at that! That girl is something else.” Mama is always so happy when she doesn't make people afraid.

  “She's gonna' be an old-timer, huh?” I said.

  Mama shook her head. “No, child. Ten years almost to the day. May fourth,” she said, her face bright like it hadn't been in a long time.

  I didn't get it at first. The woman was so young, like in her twenties. How could she be happy to have ten years left? But then I thought, maybe she was sick with something really bad, and she thought she was a goner already. To her, maybe ten years was like a whole new life.

  It's weird. I've seen grown men with gray hair and deep lines in their faces drop to their knees and cry after Mama told them they had twenty-five years. No lie. Maybe they thought they had forever, and Mama's telling them the day, month, and year just made it real. And then there are people like this lady, so young and pretty, with no time left at all, and they walk out smiling like it's Christmas. Those people are my favorite kind.

  Mama says she wasn't born knowing. She says she just woke up one morning when she was sixteen, looked at her family at the breakfast table, and knew. She knew her father was going to drop dead of a heart attack in January, in three years, after giving a Sunday sermon. She knew her mother was going to live to be ninety just like her great-aunt. She knew her brother Joe was going to get killed in an Army accident in 1987, and her sister was going to get shot to death by her boyfriend in 1999. She says she just ran to her room and cried, because all that knowing hurt her heart.

  Then it started coming true. Mama says her father dropped dead of a heart attack after giving the sermon the first Sunday after New Year's, in January, and her mother treated Mama like it was her fault. Same when the phone call came about Mama's brother, my dead Uncle Joe.

  Mama wanted to hide her knowing, but right after her father died like she said he would, people started coming to the house to see her. Because some people—maybe they're just weird, or they're less scared than other people—think knowing is power. Just like my teacher said. But Mama doesn't feel that way, not at all. A curse, she calls it. She has all this knowing, and there's nothing she can do to stop it once she knows. Even if she prays and fasts, it doesn't change anything. My dead Uncle Joe never even joined the Army because Mama begged him not to, but he got run over by a car on the exact day she said in 1987 anyway, the same year I was born.

  Nobody can cheat it, except maybe the other way. Mama knew a boy in high school who got her to tell him how old he would be on the day it would happen, and she said he would be seventy-two. Then, he decided to act stupid and jump off the top bleacher at the football stadium like he was Superman, and he broke his neck. Mama saw it happen, and he was dead on the spot when he was only eighteen. That was the only time Mama was wrong.

  Mama told me she had to think about that a long, long time. That was when she left home for good, and she spent more than a year thinking about how she got the date wrong for that one boy. Then, she decided on an answer: Maybe it'll happen faster if you make it happen on purpose, but it never happens later. The day is the day, and that's all there is to it. That's what Mama says.

  Mama never had a boyfriend or anything, not the kind of boyfriend who gives you flowers on your birthday or takes you to the movies. She never even knew my daddy's name. Some people might not tell their children something like that, but Mama will say all kinds of things. She tells me she was an ugly child coming up, always sassing back and running around where she wasn't supposed to be, sticking her nose in grown folks' business, and the knowing came as her punishment. “God don't like ugly,” she always tells me. She says that to scare me into acting right so I won't get punished the way she did, but that doesn't scare me. I wouldn't mind knowing the way she knows. I'd find a way to get rich from it instead of letting it drive me crazy like Mama does.

  Grandmama is sixty-eight now. She still lives in the same house in Macon, all alone, and most of the time she won't return Mama's calls, not since Auntie Ree got shot by her boyfriend. Everyone tried to warn Auntie Ree because her boyfriend used to beat her up, but then again, it wouldn't have made a difference anyway, just like with my dead Uncle Joe. Mama saw how it would all happen.

  I always call Grandmama collect once a month, no matter where we are. She picks up the phone if she hears my voice on her answering machine, but she won't talk to Mama except by accident. The way I see it, Grandmama's husband is dead and two of her children are gone, too, and I think she's mad because Mama told her she still has so long to wait.

  The day we had to move from Miami Beach, I'd just aced a math test, no lie. I had the second-highest score in the class—answers come to me easy if I think hard enough—and on the way home from school I was looking at the palm trees through the school bus window, thinking it would be snowing if we were still living in Detroit like we did last winter. Then when I walked through the door, Mama was sitting there on the sofa with a Marlboro Light. Damn.

  “We're moving on,” she said. “Pack a bag.”

  Her face was damp, and there were little wads of toilet paper all over the floor, like there had been a parade. She'd been crying all day while I was in school. “You ain't working today?” I asked her, hoping it wasn't what I thought. I like new places, but I didn't want to leave. Not already.

  “I been fired. So we're moving.”

  “Rosa fired you, Mama? How come?”

  Mama's face turned hard, and she dragged on her cigarette, sucking it like reefer smoke. “We had a fight,” Mama said. She blew the smoke out while she talked. “She didn't have no right to say what she said. 'Bout how I need help to take care of you right, I need to call Big Brothers or some mess, how I can't give you things like you need. You ain't none of her goddamn business.”

  The funny thing is, I always wondered what it would be like to be in Big Brothers, to have some dude who wears a suit to his job every day come play ball with me on weekends. It's not the same as a daddy, but it's better than nothing. But it's too bad for Rosa that she said that, because Mama gets pissed when people say she can't take care of me, especially after Atlanta. And she always has the last word in a fight. Once she gets mad, there's no keeping her quiet
.

  “So you told her?”

  “Just go throw your things in a bag, Nicky.”

  “I don't want to leave here, Mama. Dang,” I whined. I sounded like a baby, but I didn't care. “Tell her you lied. Tell her you just made it up.”

  I could see her hand holding the cigarette was shaking. New tears were running down her face. “I don't know why I said that to Rosa. That wasn't right. Maybe she didn't mean nothin' by it, but she made me so mad, talking about you.”

  I sat next to her on the couch and reached for her hand. She wouldn't squeeze back. “Tell her it don't mean nothing. We don't have to move just because of that. That ain't nothing.”

  “No, Nicky . . .” Mama whispered. “Telling to hurt somebody is the worst thing a person can do. Even the devil couldn't do nothing worse.”

  I'd seen Mama acting crazy for sure, running around in her underclothes, screaming at anybody who could hear, but I'd never seen her quiet. That scared me more than it would have if she'd been throwing pots and pans on the floor. She sounded different.

  I got mad all of a sudden. “Shoot, Mama, forget Rosa. Who does she think she is, trying to say you can't take care of me? Nobody asked her.”

  Mama laughed a little and stared at the floor.

  “You are taking care of me, Mama. Better than anybody.”

  “Sure am . . .” Mama said, still not looking up at me. “I got to . . . until May twelfth.”

  “Two thousand five,” I said, squeezing her hand again, and Mama just closed her eyes.

  Until right then, when I heard myself say it, the date had seemed so far away. I'd always known I would be fifteen that year, but I'd never stopped to think it was only three years away. It wasn't so far off anymore.

  We left Miami Beach, which is too bad because it's so alive there. There are so many people who sing and dance and laugh and act like every day is the only one left. I wish we could have stayed there. Even in November, it's already freezing in Chicago, and people are dressing warm, walking fast, waiting for spring to come. In a cold place, it's like there's no such thing as today, just tomorrow. Will it snow tomorrow? Will it be sunny tomorrow? But Mama said she couldn't face Rosa, so we jumped on a bus and stopped riding when we got bored. This time, we stopped in Chicago. But there's never really anywhere to go.

  I guess Mama felt so bad about what she said to Rosa because it reminded her of all the times before when she's lost her temper and said what she doesn't mean to say. I don't think she can help it. I was only six when she did it to me, even though I don't remember what I did that made her so mad in the first place. I was little, but I never forgot what she said: “I'll be through with your foolishness on May 12, 2005, because that's your day, Nicky. You hear?”

  I told a friend once, a kid named Kalil I had just started hanging out with at my school in Atlanta, after he told me about something bad that had happened to his family in the country where they came from. We were just standing on the playground, and we told our worst stories. There were soldiers in his story; mine was only about Mama and May 12, 2005.

  That was the only time anyone ever looked at me the way people always look at Mama. But the thing I like most about kids is that even though they get scared like anybody else, they can forget they're scared pretty fast. Especially kids like Kalil, who know there's more to the world than video games and homework. I guess that made us alike. He hardly waited any time at all before he said, “Does that bother you?” Just like that.

  I'd never thought about that before. We were both ten then, so fifteen was five years off, half my whole life, and by that time I'd be in high school, nearly a man. A whole different person. I told him I didn't think it bothered me. When you grow up around someone like Mama and you hear about it all the time, you know everybody has a turn, and you just try to find something interesting every day to make you glad it hasn't happened yet.

  That's why I didn't mind it in Miami Beach when the TV only got two channels—see, I don't need more than two channels, as long as there's at least one thing I can watch. I'll watch the evening news and soap operas in English or Spanish and even golf, if Tiger Woods is playing. Hell, I don't even mind when we don't have a TV, which we usually don't. I read comic books and books from the library and take walks and watch people. Kalil said he wouldn't go to school if he were me, but I don't mind. There's always something interesting somewhere, even at school. Like the way my math teacher smiles, when you can see her whole heart in it. I don't think anyone in my class has noticed that except me.

  “You're really brave, Nicky,” Kalil told me in Atlanta. I don't feel brave but I do think about it sometimes. I wonder how it'll go down, if it will hurt when it happens, or if I'll be crossing the street and a car will come around a corner all of a sudden like with my dead Uncle Joe. Or maybe I'll see someone getting robbed and I'll get shot like Auntie Ree when I try to stop the bad guy, and everyone will say I was a hero. That would be best. I wonder if it'll happen even if I stay in bed that day and never leave my room, or if I'll just get struck by lightning while I'm staring out of my window at the greatest storm I've ever seen. I never get sick, so I don't think it'll be that. I think it'll be something else, but I'm not sure what.

  Even Mama says she doesn't know.

  Luscious

  BY BERNICE L. MCFADDEN

  FROM Loving Donovan

  Before she was Luscious, she was Rita.

  Little wide-eyed Rita, daughter of Erasmus and Bertha Smith, hardworking people who knew God, but not every Sunday. They drank some and sometimes too much. Played their Billie Holiday records for the neighborhood, whether their neighbors wanted to hear them or not. Loved more than they fought, but fought just the same, had the scars and broken knickknacks to prove the latter, Rita to prove the first.

  Before she was Luscious with a number and a cell mate she was Rita of Detroit. Rita of Cadillac Avenue. Tall, red-boned Rita who swayed down the street on long lovely legs so well oiled they gleamed. Rita with the green eyes and good hair that touched the middle of her back. Rita so fine, the white people forgave and forgot her thick lips and broad nose.

  Before she was Luscious of Brooklyn, Luscious of Stanley Avenue, she was just Rita minding her own business who one day looked up into the eyes of her father's best friend and saw something there that she'd only seen in the eyes of school boys and lately strange men that beckoned her and sometimes brushed their fingers against her arm when she ignored their calls.

  Manny Evans, raven colored, bald-headed, broad smiling, pockets heavy with nickels Manny.

  Manny Evans who had bounced Rita on his knee, patted the top of her head, dropped nickels into her saving jar, the old mayonnaise jar Bertha had cleaned and put aside for just that purpose.

  Manny Evans who had women on corners and a twenty-two in his sock. He wore taps on the heels of his shoes and the nickel-jingle-clickety-click sounds he made when he walked down the streets told everybody he was coming, but no one messed with him because they were sure about the twenty-two in his sock, and suspicious about the breast pocket of his jacket and the nickel-free pocket of his pants.

  Rita had always liked the way his head shone and as she got older she began to appreciate his color, so black and smooth. She found herself thinking about his shoulders and the gold pinky ring he wore, the one with the black onyx stone. “Black like me,” he said, “strong like me.”

  Rita filling out in places, eyes greener now, hair loose instead of pulled back, stockings replacing knee socks, ears pierced and Rita all of the time licking her lips keeping them moist, keeping them shiny.

  Manny Evans dropping paper money in her saving jar instead of nickels, wanting to pat her ass instead of the top of her head, wanting to bounce her on his knee again and maybe on something else.

  He visits on Saturday nights. Comes by with a bottle of whiskey after checking on his women, collecting money, and laying his hands on people who've allowed their eyes to slide over and past him when he called out to them, “Yo
u got my money Nigga?”

  Erasmus and Manny drink, smoke Pall Malls, and play dominoes while Bertha talks to Adele from next door. Adele, tall like a man with hands that wrinkled early and callused two years ago on the palms.

  Before she was Luscious on parole and scrubbing floors for white folk in Indian Village, she was Rita and that's what was written on her bedroom door in big black letters so Manny couldn't have mistaken it for the bathroom. But he did.

  His fly is down and his dick is already in his hands when he stumbles in stinking of liquor and bleary-eyed. He apologizes when he walks in on her in the middle of drying her just-bathed body, but he don't jump back and close the door or drop his eyes in shame. He just stares at her and his hand, the one not holding on to his dick, reaches behind him and pushes the door shut.

  His eyes enjoy her face and then her naked breasts and finally the thin line of black hair that begins two inches below her navel.

  Before she was Luscious, she was Rita, confused and held down in her own bed by strong hands. Those same hands covering her mouth, roughly touching and rubbing. Those hands are rough like the steel wool Bertha scrubs the pots with and Rita believes her skin will shred beneath them. She can't imagine a more painful feeling and then she doesn't have to because he's inside of her, pushing into the place where only her index finger had ever been.

  Rita, before she was Luscious, her mind bending and her body coming apart on the inside and Manny not allowing her to scream or breathe and when he's done he don't even look at her he just looks down at the bloodstains on his pants and tucks back in the paper money sticking out of his pockets, but he leaves the nickels that have fallen out and onto the bed.

  Manny Evans finds the bathroom just fine now and returns to Erasmus, his Pall Malls and liquor and proceeds to win three more domino games.

 

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