I guessed they would care when she turned up in a dumpster.
FINALLY, SPRING BECAME WARM ENOUGH to keep me from shivering on the fire escape. Chase and I enjoyed the breeze in front of the open windows. We devoured Chinese food off a rolling desk, his Chromebook in his lap and my tablet in my hands. At first we spent our days and nights talking about Summer, until we didn’t. It was easier for him to zone off into trending topics, ROIs, and target markets as I ramped up the call-to-action subliminal messaging in a client’s latest blog. But finishing Summer’s “Circumstances” had pricked me with the need.
“I think I should put all this homemade art away,” I told Chase. “Get it out of sight, out of mind now.”
Chop suey twisted in my mouth while I talked. It was my special request of him that night, the most greens I had in weeks.
“Why would you do that?” he asked.
“Well, I can start buying real work,” I told him. “I’ll need room for it.”
Then, thinking of how much he’d just paid for our dinner, “When I start to make real money again, of course.”
He went to the counter for second helpings.
“I think it’s all good for you,” he said. “It’s inspiring. She really was good. She could’ve made it to higher planes had she wanted to. I think she was scared, of all the rejection on the way.”
“That’s what makes it so sad to keep around,” I sighed. “Stunted potential. Nobody but the people who really cared about her will ever know how good she was.”
“I think it’s almost like having her here still,” Chase smiled. “Something to pass down. Save your money, hon. You won’t regret it.”
We ate and worked in silence, then went to bed together. I had just received a new box of little nothings from an online sale. But he was asleep in minutes. I stayed up replaying how he thought of Summer’s art as “having her here still.” It could be how he thought of me.
Chase hadn’t fled or stopped coming by. Just scooted back from the table a bit. He gave me the sense I was an obligation more than an anticipation. He brooded over long hours and a new “diet.” They required him to stay at the gym longer than I liked to wait to see him at night. His explanation was valid: wanting to look good for summer, no pun intended, I’m sure. Indeed, he hardly noticed he said the word. So, he had become insensitive as well. It was enough to make me think guilt was setting into him more than he’d thought it would. I prepared myself for the day one of us got a conscience. Thankfully, he had to do so much social media for work he forgot about it in real life, so I was not constantly streaming around the internet with him. The break would be clean.
OVER A LENGTHY CHAT THREAD, my college buddy Cathy convinced me into a playdate with her five-year-old and newborn—never mind I had no children to bring along to play, too. I had not seen her in over a year. She flew out for Mama’s funeral last February and invited me to stay awhile with her that March. I was running late, so the newest bundle of joy had to settle for a gift of uptown dollar-store fare: generic baby lotion that did not smell too off, a pack of Pampers, the surprise of “organic” baby wipes, onesies.
Cathy sat on the steps of the Union Square terminal doing what she was doing the last time I saw her: yelling at her first child to put his shirt back on and stop running so fast. A gray fabric baby carrier was strapped tight against her chest. Her hair was tied in long twists she bundled atop her head. She wore a wrap-around skirt with totem poles stitched down the side where it cinched. The tie was now unknotted. She held her skirt up by hand.
“Your skirt . . .” I told her. I grabbed up its edge just as it almost came loose.
“It’s totally okay,” she said as she kissed my cheek and hugged me at my neck. “I’ve had two kids pull my boobs out and tear off my clothes all the time. All my modesty left a long time ago. Here. Take her.”
Inside the tight fabric was a delightfully creamy face. Raven eyes and wheat-colored curls marked that Cathy’s mother was a by-product of a Brit’s discovery of Japanese women during military service. Her father was Nigerian. Her Baby Daddy was Haitian—not in the country now, but on his obligatory expatriate term of a few years after marrying an American, to assume legitimacy. With the first kid, Cathy was fine with a “spiritual ceremony.” After a second, she demanded he get a real job—not selling weed. The four-month-old was a jumbo water balloon in my arms, not even as heavy as a bag of potatoes. I knew her name was Sara, and may have been able to pick her out of a crowd due to all the photos Cathy sent over email.
“I’m gonna go ahead and proceed with getting my tubes tied now,” I told Cathy. “I’ll just take this one and be on my merry way.”
“No,” Cathy said. “Take him.”
Her oldest had joined a gang of anonymous playdaters about his age in a game of chase for a Nerf ball. I indulged myself in a compulsion I found calming in spite of its grueling reason. I scanned the crowd of pretty mothers sporting activewear and bags under their eyes for a soft and hopeful face like Summer’s. I concocted a nonviolent story in my head: Prince Charming is a rich widower, he makes the best hot chocolate ever (with marshmallows), and romances Summer to sip it on our roof, they speed off in a limo and he proposes to the new mother of his sad children. And the limo crashes before the proposal. Survival, but amnesia. So, Summer forgets to tell him about her family and her life and me. She is slowly remembering.
“Autumn!” Cathy yelled. “Don’t believe anyone who tells you having a newborn is stressful. If they’ve said that, then they’ve never had a kindergartener.”
She marched off yelling, “Oscar, get over here, kindergartener!”
I was glad I came. It is restorative to see faces you’ve known for fifteen years. Cathy’s plans to be a doctor, via a Romance languages concentration, did not materialize to much beyond tour-guiding Manhattan and teaching English in Liberia, where the natives spoke French like she did. But Cathy was lucky. She was an only child of a tenured Pratt professor father and an older mother who almost gave up after many miscarriages. They disapproved of her choices but still bought her a two-bedroom co-op in Park Slope. Her son had gone to private preschool and was now in private school. The sandy-colored boy called me Auntie Autumn. I reached in the cheap gold gift bag.
“I didn’t forget . . .” I told him.
I pulled out a box of Sour Patch Kids, his favorite. I could always bring candy to playfully spite the mothers of my growing number of “nieces” and “nephews.” He screamed “Yes!” and started to tear open the box. Cathy confiscated it.
“You will not have one Sour Patch Kid until you eat lunch. Stop that crying and tell Auntie Autumn ‘Thank you.’”
We waited for the time it took Cathy to grab the newborn and stuff her back into her warm felt nest. Oscar stood in silent protest.
Cathy and I used to spend more frequent days together lolling through sidewalk traffic in Union Square or Fort Greene with her disinterested son giving us pause to catch up with him, or for him to catch up with us. We drifted through block after block in a couple of hours, talking about where we should go and what we should do next and if we were hungry and what we had a taste for, until it was dark and time to go home. We wandered to subjects her background made important to her, while I could not have cared less for them than the price of all the corn in Illinois. My worldview was limited to a $20 auto-pay to Children International each month to sponsor an orphan girl in Sierra Leone. Her name was Fatu. But Cathy was knowledgeable about Syrian crises, sweatshops, Mexican Chihuahua mills, and sex trafficking. She was involved in Black immigrant rights protests and crusades, down to marrying one who overstayed his visa. Maybe this is why, even though her living space and children were taken care of, her allowance was slim. We wound up in a McDonald’s to split a box of thirty-two chicken nuggets and packs of $1 fries with her son, swapping new theories of how our America was going to hell in a handbasket.
“We don’t have jobs because White America is mad about a Black president,” Cat
hy said loud enough for a White man near us to look twice. “We would have been better off with Hillary. No big huge threat like him.”
“Looks like we’re about to get our chance to see,” I said.
Cathy fussed under her shirt to finagle a nipple out for Sara, and the man nearby glared more. “Yes, and finally women will breastfeed in public without stares.”
The man turned back to his Big Mac.
“Cathy, woman president or not, nothing will change the fact this is a White man’s world and we’re the bottom caste,” I said.
“Well, can we at least go back to the days it wasn’t so blatant?” she said. “I can deal with covert racism. You’re a nutcase if you can’t. But right in our faces like this?”
The White man shifted and scrolled his iPhone. She changed the subject.
“How’s Chase?” Cathy asked.
She only brought up Mama or Summer if I did, and she must have guessed Chase—that loyal man until the end—was the nearest to family I had now.
“He’s good,” I said.
I would not tell her a thing, although Cathy was probably one who would have suspended judgment in the name of Black love, African heritage multiplication, biodiversity, and educated Black two-parent householding.
“Well, you see him a lot? Do you see anybody up there all by yourself now?”
“We still see each other.” Cathy wasn’t the judging type, but still I held back.
“Well, good. I worry about you. I can’t let you wind up a Joyce Vincent.”
“A who?” I could not keep up with all the stars overdosing and dying young.
“A Joyce Vincent,” she insisted. “A British woman who was a skeleton in her apartment by the time anybody found her. Three years she sat alone in there. Pretty, educated, popular. Even a singer once.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s a shame people totally neglect their older relatives, but they do.”
“She was only thirty-eight. Three sisters! Real boyfriends. But nobody looked for her for three years. Her mail piled up and her television played the whole time. When people are going through stuff, they cut off. I can’t let you go missing, too.”
“Stay out of creepy YouTube, Cathy,” I advised. “That shit gets you twisted quick.”
I should know. I’d poured a whole printer cartridge into violence and crime.
She shoved her breast under her collar. She patted the baby’s back urgently.
“Cathy, I’m totally fine.” My rote saying. “Some Blacks have to stay in Harlem, even with rapes and murders and women’s disappearances no one cares about. I know the Jaylyn Stewart situation has not escaped you.”
I left out my foolish attempt to track down his apartment for signs of Summer in it, only leading me to that scary super named Sanchez.
“He’s being framed,” Cathy said.
“Why would you think that?” I didn’t pretend to hide my shock.
“It’s not what I think. It was on the news. Wrong DNA or something like that.”
“No, wrong teeth impressions. His DNA is still there.”
“One woman comes from a family that knows how to make noise. They had to arrest somebody. And, you know I’m all for Black men’s rights, but . . .”
“So am I. It just seems there’s never any uproar when it’s about Black women’s rights. We riot when Black men are shot. What about those women?”
“It’s not about taking sides against Black men for Black women, Autumn. It’s about plain right and wrong, always.”
I loved her too much not to agree to disagree. I expected too much of her to know how I felt. She was married, after all. Her parents lived just blocks from her. She couldn’t possibly know what it was to live with no nest. If a Joyce Vincent really existed, this world must cough up some blame that a sky-high percentage of pretty, educated Black women settled as unmarried spinsters. Out of those I knew across my real-life-turned-online networks, most didn’t marry even if they wanted to. But it was not a choice. Many married and found themselves the breadwinners. Or they married men who were not Black. The rest seemed frozen in time. They kept gambling in the “What’s our status?” game with all their chips on the table and nothing stacking up.
“And, you can’t marry any man if you’re against them. Or afraid of them.”
“I’m not against them, and I do see men,” I said. “We can’t all be mixed and light-skinned with long-hair Miss Cathy.”
“Wait, I’m darker than you.”
“You are not.”
“Oh, you just wait until summer . . .”
I heard the tap-click of a camera’s shutter in the back of my mind, and the room went still like a photograph. And she just kept on saying it.
“You’ve seen me in the summer, half brown, half red, like a spoiled apple.”
She laughed while I drifted off, away and away, thinking of Summer . . .
“And, you can hardly call this rat’s nest ‘mixed hair.’ I have to schedule a weekend just to comb it out. We are definitely locking Sara’s hair. Oscar won’t let me near him with a comb, but I’m getting him to a real Rasta woman on Fulton to lock it—tight as she can. I don’t care what Haitians say about dreadlocks being low-class. I’m not doing it anymore. Autumn? Autumn?”
The last New Year’s Eve with my mother and sister was a foreshadow of what this next year might be like. Summer came in coked up hours after the ball dropped: speed talking, sniffing, and glassy-eyed. I didn’t know what to do about my sister mixed up in the wrong crowd in her thirties. Her switch was so pronounced she slashed her shoulder-length mane Mama slaved over until we left home. She chopped it to a raggedy, lopsided Mohawk. I thought that was an attempt to fit in with the artsy crowd. But I knew the Mohawk marked a new moment in things. Mama mustered strength to sit up on her elbows and rattle out her disgust through an oxygen tube.
Chase came around that weekend. He graciously took over Mama’s care for the night. He did not think the Mohawk was a big deal.
“I guess it’s something radical,” he said. “Happens if you’re going through a lot.”
“It looks absolutely awful,” I said.
“I think it’s kind of cool, in a Mr. T sort of way,” Chase grinned.
He slithered two thick cotton washrags around in cold water and set them in our ice bucket we once kept around just for fun. Now, Mama needed it. He lifted the washrags with a pair of salad tongs. Mama liked the cold on her forehead and chest to reverse fevers.
“I thought it would be cool, too,” I said. “But now. It’s just too big of a sign. There’s enough death and disappearing going on in this house.”
“Maybe that’s why it was a cool thought,” Chase said. “Coping with a mother disappearing by accident, so make something disappear deliberately?”
“Okay, Dr. Phil,” I said.
Chase left me alone with only my reflection across the mirror. My black turtleneck stretched against a roll across my belly. The gym hadn’t seen me in months. At that point, this group of oddball friends was a little secret between Summer and me. Chase was largely in the dark. She warned me not to tell him. He just thought she was spending more time “networking.” I just thought it was a phase. Summer always needed her crews to leave me out of, like her own primal push for a separate identity after a lifetime of forced association with me. But about a month later she wanted to be so separate she rejected Chase’s trip to Grenada, sent me off, and was the last daughter to hold Mama’s hand.
I WAS CRYING IN THE middle of McDonald’s. Oscar stared. The White man finally had enough of us. He balled up all his food paper and left.
“Thank you for coming to Illinois for my mother’s funeral,” I whimpered.
In my meltdown, Cathy turned to wipe barbecue sauce off Oscar’s shirt and whisper it was time to go pee.
“Of course,” she said. “I was happy to be there. I know you’d do the same for me. I loved Miss Spencer. Remember she came to the dining hall yelling, ‘Where are all the Black boys
?’ It was hilarious.”
“It really, really was.” Cathy’s goofiness was a defense mechanism few could understand let alone tolerate, but it had come in handy for me the last fifteen years.
“Oh my God. No men for us there. And look at us now. Some men are so lucky.”
Cathy and I stayed to gossip through Oscar’s complaints of boredom. To extend our woman time, we rationed him Sour Patch Kids in exchange for quiet. So-and-so did not get married like she was supposed to. The other so-and-so quit her law firm to join the Peace Corps, disillusioned she was too plump and needed a weave to make partner. Yet another so-and-so did not call us when she came to New York for a trip we saw her post pictures of. The whole time, Cathy never mentioned Summer. She specialized in being cheerful.
I already knew I would slip into the corner bodega before I got home, to buy “wine product” labeled Merlot. I told this to Cathy. She asked if I wanted some weed she had in the diaper bag instead. I declined. I felt sedated as it was. I walked down to the platform at Fourteenth Street to wait with them for the F train to Brooklyn, where they would come up after dark, and my friend would keep one child at her breasts and her eyes on another far ahead of her, not thinking again about Auntie Autumn until I next appeared with sweets.
TWELVE
Soon, I wandered back to the Union Square Barnes & Noble on my own. I landed in the Psychology section. I thought here was where I could find books comparable to The Art of War. Devils and angels on earth. No in-betweens. An angel never does rude or fucked-up shit to another person and just says, “Oops, I had a bad day.” And a devil does not apologize. If I was an angel, then I must figure out how to handle devils without killing anyone because this is not what angels do. My manners will be better. How do angels win if they do not carry long swords?
Speaking of Summer Page 11