Tutored

by Allison Whittenberg

  “They were giving them away at the social services center.”

  Hakiam walked over to the seat and rocked it with his foot. At first, Malikia seemed amused, but within seconds, she got fussy and broke into her customary low cry.

  “Why didn’t you leave well enough alone?” Leesa asked him.

  Malikia started crying harder, and Hakiam thought, Babies are such wimps. They needed an endless supply of petting and hugs. Constant soothing.

  “This world is rough,” he told Malikia. “So you gotta be tough.”

  “Great advice,” Leesa said before going back into the bathroom. “How do you like my hair?”

  “It’s unbeweavable, Goldilocks. Don’t you have to work tonight?”

  “Nope.”

  The voice from the TV changed to another rapper. The radiator coughed. The streetlight sliced through the blinds, making horizontal lines across the room.

  Some kids down the hall were playing with a ball and paddle. It made a repetitive sound. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Next door, a plate broke when it hit the floor. “Shit,” someone said.

  Hakiam heard another bang from the hall and went out to investigate.

  He saw two kids, about four or five years old, who had set down the ball and paddle and were playing in the trash chute, sticking their heads in. Hakiam considered running over and telling them to stop, but he soon nixed the idea. They looked like the type that would kick Hakiam in the shins rather than listen.

  He went back inside and took an extra blanket from Leesa’s room. He grabbed a pillow and arranged it on the armchair. He took a look over at Malikia in her car seat on the floor. She started crying.

  “Darn you,” Hakiam told her.

  That really got her open, toothless mouth to bawling. Here we go again.

  Leesa walked by him, smelling of a Giorgio perfume knockoff.

  “You going out?” he asked her.

  “Yep.”

  “Who you going out with?”

  “What’s it to you?” she snapped.

  He plunked his feet on the end table, closed his eyes, and nearly fell asleep. Then he jumped up and said, “I almost forgot.” He retrieved the bag that Wendy had given him.

  Leesa stopped in her tracks. “Where did you get that from?” she asked.

  “The girl.”

  “What girl?”

  “The girl from the center.”

  Leesa’s eyes went back to the gift. She curled her lip at him and said, “What makes her think I want her charity?”

  “You want everybody else’s,” he muttered.

  Leesa took the outfit out of the bag. She held the onesie to her as a half smile leaked out. She looked at her daughter, then back at her cousin.

  “So, you like this girl?”

  He shrugged. “She’s all right.”

  “She got an extra room?”

  16

  Life is an issue of circumstance.

  All Wendy knew of life was living in a primarily white area, attending primarily white schools, and associating with primarily white people.

  Like the only chip in the cookie, she was used to it, but that didn’t mean she felt comfortable. And though she had never been asked explicitly “What’s it like being the only black girl in class?” she had an answer ready in her head.

  So what’s it really like?

  It’s like not getting invited to a birthday party.

  It’s like not being invited to a birthday party for a person you know just as well as the people who are invited.

  It’s like not being invited to a birthday party for a person you know just as well as the people who are invited right in front of you, as if you were invisible.

  Invisible, not in the way little kids fantasized about, but like Ralph Ellison described in his famous book. Most people thought that being a different color would make everyone see you. Actually, it was just the opposite. You were more likely to be ignored. You got talked about like you were just not there.

  When Wendy was young, it affected her more, but as she’d gotten older she could choose her company a little better. She befriended Erin and Erin befriended her, and somehow when you had one person at school who you could really trust and relate to, life was livable.

  But that didn’t mean that there weren’t still times.

  After spring break last term, Wendy had walked past a group of girls who were discussing their vacation to Cancún. They had their forearms side by side, and were comparing their tans and telling each other:

  “You are black.”

  “No, you are black.”

  “No, no, you are black.”

  Wendy remembered thinking, If only it were that simple. Color was the easy part. Black was also a culture. Wendy doubted that these girls ever had black-eyed peas to welcome in the New Year or danced the pop and lock at a family picnic. And beyond cultural expressions, she wondered if these girls had any concept of consciousness. Did they know anything about Angela Davis or Sally Hemmings? Or were they stuck in a one-dimensional experience of race? A pigeonholing, based on sight only.

  The hope of gaining a more complete understanding of her race had led Wendy to volunteer at the center. Today marked her two-month anniversary.

  When Wendy saw Hakiam approach, she slipped a bookmark into her schoolbook and set it before her on the table. She wore a lace-inset tank top, low-rise jeans, and a crocheted wrap as a belt.

  “You look different,” Hakiam told her.

  “It’s laundry day,” she answered.

  “It ought to be laundry day every day.”

  He sat down beside her, hoisted his feet onto the desk, and yawned audibly.

  She pushed his feet to the floor and spread out her tutoring folder.

  There was a stare-down for a minute or so, then finally he asked, “What are you waiting for?”

  “Hell to freeze over,” she answered.

  “I thought you were here to tutor, Tutor.”

  “Did you read the passages you were supposed to?”

  He snorted and said, “No.”

  “Listen, Hakiam, let’s get one thing straight—”

  “I know you’re on me, Wendy.”

  “I’m on you?” she said.

  “Yep, you dig me.”

  She gave a patronizing smile. “I think you have things wrong. I only went out with you because I thought we would have something to talk about, but I was wrong. And if you think that you can just come here and waste time—”

  “Like you’re so busy with other people.”

  “It’s not my fault that people who have already proven that they can’t complete high school in the traditional setting also happen to be the same group of people who have trouble completing their GED in this nontraditional setting. You know the saying, ‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink’—or in this case, think.”

  He shoved in closer to her and she shoved herself away.

  He tipped back in his chair and threaded his hands behind his head.

  Wendy went back to paging through her calc book and began to pick up on a weird vibe. She noticed the way he was eyeing her tote bag, which hung on the seat next to her.

  “Is there something you want out of my bag?” she asked him.

  He wiggled his eyebrows and told her that she better keep a closer eye on her stuff.

  “Now, why would I have to worry about that with just you in the room?”

  “I’m just saying, don’t tempt an honest person.”

  She took her tote bag and brought it in close to her body. “I won’t tempt an honest person or you.”

  He smirked at her remark.

  “Don’t tell me you’re a thief, too, Hakiam?”

  He tried to suppress his grin. “All right, I won’t tell you,” he said.

  “Don’t you care how you’re inconveniencing people?”

  “They’ll get over it.”

  “How would you like it if I stole your wallet?”


  “There ain’t nothing in it. Go to town.”

  “What if there were something in it?”

  “Well, I guess I wouldn’t like that.”

  She gave a perfunctory smile and said, “That’s the breakthrough I was looking for.”

  Then she rose from the chair and stood up tall. “Hakiam, you need to go cold turkey.”

  “I have. Since I been here in Philly I ain’t lifted nothing. Besides, when I did steal back in Cincinnati, I wasn’t one of those people who stole just to steal. That’s sick.”

  “You can excuse away anything, Hakiam.”

  “Just about.”

  Her nails dug deep in her palm, and she thought hard before she said this next part to him. “Here’s an idea. Why don’t you get a job?”

  “I have a job. I’m a male babysitter.”

  “No, I mean a paying job. One that earns a steady income, so that you don’t have to think about knocking little old ladies over the head for their purses.”

  He shrugged. “Who the hell would hire me? I don’t even have a GED.”

  Wendy looked Hakiam dead in the eye and said, “This is the United States of America. Trust me, Hakiam, McDonald’s is hiring.”

  17

  Even McDonald’s wanted references. So did Burger King, KFC, and Long John Silver’s. Hakiam found that out the hard way as he traipsed down Chestnut Street and up Market Street, then back down JFK Boulevard. He’d started out pretty early, eleven a.m. (early for him), amid the idled traffic and a smattering of shoppers. The city had a pulse, with its growling buses and honking horns, but every application he took was dead on arrival. They all wanted him to supply the same information, and there was no space on the form to explain that he didn’t have a last place worked because he had never worked anywhere formal, and he didn’t have anyone to vouch for his character, and he wasn’t in any organization that he’d like to mention. So besides his name, Leesa’s address, and the fact that he had finished grade school, he didn’t have any selling points.

  Still, he hit up place after place in a time-murdering exercise called going through the motions.

  He collected about seven applications, but he ended up crumpling them all up and tossing them to the wind. He was convinced that all that was going to happen if he did take the time and hand them back in was that he’d be discarded, dumped like shit off a shovel, or worse, left in the bottom of a stack of applications that just got taller and taller.

  Why even try?

  Hakiam had learned long ago that compassion and understanding were on the list of endangered species. The more you needed something, the less likely you were to get it. So who wanted a job anyway? It was just another hassle. Hakiam would hate having a boss and superiors. They would always check on him. They would come see what he was doing, then they’d walk back. That was what passed for supervision.

  If he had a job, he’d hate never quite knowing what he could or couldn’t get away with. Should he turn to the window? Should he risk getting lost in thought? Could he take anything from the company refrigerator? Could he take home a stapler or two? Could he borrow that PC for the weekend?

  The last place he swung by was a mom-and-pop-style dollar store that actually had a HELP WANTED sign in the window.

  It was a cluttered, not-too-clean-looking place. Hakiam had to inch his way in sideways so as not to knock down anything. He asked the lady behind the counter, who had teeth like a beaver, what hours she needed to be covered. She called over her shoulder to someone in the back, “Henry, somebody’s out here asking about the job.”

  The man grunted from behind the curtain, “We don’t got any openings. Tell him to hit the road.”

  His words hovered then settled on Hakiam like dust in the room.

  Well, if that doesn’t beat all. What kind of rejection was that? At least the man could come out and look Hakiam over before he overlooked him.

  Hakiam turned and left with less care than he’d come in with. A box of greeting cards fell on the floor, but he kept moving.

  Back outside, he passed more stores, but this go-round he didn’t inquire within.

  Life just kept stacking up against him. He should have stayed in bed. Nobody was ever going to give him a break, and they had the nerve to call this the City of Brotherly Love. Where was the softness? Where was the compassion? He hated the class distinctions that he saw in Center City. He burned with envy for every rich person who strolled by him. They had their gall, especially the women with their good jobs and their flared trousers with the side zip, their cropped jackets with mandarin collars. Each one of them pecked at the pain, pushing him into deeper anger. There was Hakiam, near-broke, in his bobo sneakers.

  Now he was really boxed into a corner. He couldn’t steal. He couldn’t get a job. What else was there to life?

  There was nothing to do but go home to a home that really wasn’t his home. Go to his cousin’s home and stare at the bumpy warts of ill-plastered walls and the mold spots on the ceiling. That big-eyed girl from the tutoring center was wrong. Real wrong. This wasn’t the land of opportunity or milk and honey or gold-paved streets. For him, anywhere he went in America would be the third world.

  18

  “You lied,” he told her as he plopped himself into the chair next to her.

  “I did not,” she said, barely looking up from her tutoring log. She penciled in the notation: One student present.

  “Nobody hired me.”

  She tilted her head to the side. “That doesn’t mean I lied.”

  “You said it would be easy.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she told him. “Now you’re lying.”

  “You don’t know nothing about nothing.”

  She grinned. “That shows what you know. That sentence you just used was a double negative, so you essentially said ‘I do know something about something’!”

  “Well, you don’t.”

  “I was just trying to help you.”

  He frowned. “Some help.”

  “All right, then, I won’t help. Stay miserable and unemployed and uneducated.”

  “I tried—”

  “Try harder,” she interrupted. “Did you try the Gallery?”

  “The what?”

  “That mall that’s downtown by Independence Hall. It has about a hundred stores. Did you try your luck there?”

  “I didn’t try it at all.”

  “Well,” she said in a leading way.

  “Well,” he mimicked her.

  “Well,” she continued, not fazed by his taunting. “I suggest you apply there. Try one of the restaurants.”

  “Restaurants?”

  “I mean, burger joints, pretzel stands, any place where they serve food. You’ll never go hungry if you work at a place that serves food.”

  He met her eyes, and his lip curled.

  She sneered back at him.

  They shared a few more moments of silence.

  He hitched his chin at her. “You want to go out?”

  “Out?” she asked.

  “Yeah, out.”

  “Outside?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to go out for coffee again?” she asked.

  “No.” He shook his head. “You want to go out for coffee again?”

  Wendy’s interior voice always jibed with her exterior one. “No,” she said.

  He still stared her down. “Feel like coming over my place?”

  “You have a place?”

  “The place I’m staying at.”

  “What’s there?” she asked.

  “Me,” he said, and when that got no reaction from her, he added, “And Malikia.”

  Wendy cocked her head to the side and asked, “What’s a Malikia?”

  “The little girl I watch.”

  “What’s her name again?”

  “Malikia,” he repeated.

  Wendy had never heard that name before, and she mulled it over in her mind. She wondered if it was culturally based or purely fabricated.
Moreover, she considered its derivatives. Could it ever be turned into a nickname? “Hi, Mal” or “Good afternoon, Liki.” She supposed in a pinch it would go something like this: “Hey there, Maliky.”

  “You want to see her?” he asked.

  Wendy stood up. “I’d love to.”

  19

  Hakiam felt a pang of guilt using a three-month-old as bait to gain back Wendy’s interest. But then, he thought, there were worse things he could do. Plus, he wanted to chart her movements once he got her into the ghetto.

  Call it a bad joke, but he always thought it was funny to see people out of their natural element. Wendy, as a fish tossed into a different pond, might faint at the smell of garbage or the sight of the urine stains in the corners of the hallways. Or she could trip trying to maneuver past the broken tiles of the flooring. As they hiked up to the third floor, he accidentally kicked a large chunk of peeling gray paint and left a thick black scuff mark in its place. It blended in with the others.

  Leesa opened the door. She had on clumsy makeup, a cheap blouse, and spandex bicycle pants. Her chin dropped to the floor when she saw Wendy.

  “Hello,” Wendy said, holding out her hand. “You must be Hakiam’s cousin.”

  Leesa up-and-downed Wendy and left her extended hand unshaken.

  Hakiam ushered Wendy past Leesa into the living room, where Malikia was. Wendy pulled a bottle of hand sanitizer out of her tote bag, murmuring something about guarding against RSV. She rubbed some of the liquid on, then asked to hold the baby. When Leesa shrugged, Wendy stretched out her arms and scooped up the baby.

  Malikia took to her magically. It was like a Madonna-and-child reunion. Wendy managed to do more “Itsy Bitsy Spider’s” and “Hey, Diddle Diddle’s” with Malikia than the little girl had heard in her whole life. Malikia cooed and moved her arms in a herky-jerky motion. Then she snuggled in close to Wendy.

  Pretty soon, Hakiam got to feeling like the T in a BLT sandwich: the last of the three. Malikia and Wendy threatened to squeeze him out altogether with their bonding exercises.

  He moved to the edge of the room and stood as an onlooker, like his cousin. Leesa clicked her tongue and told Hakiam, “Malikia don’t know none of that nursery-rhyme junk. All that’s doing is going in one ear and out the other.”