How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  Dub watched his girl frozen in the moment. “You look better than that,” Dub said. But neither of them turned to acknowledge him.

  Auntie Sammy, on my mom’s side, put out red-velvet cake, the real shit. Not that she had the time to make it herself, breadwinning at GlaxoSmithKline while her husband, my uncle Eddy, moved slow up the state trooper ranks from officer to corporal with dreams of lieutenant, but she had bought some, good cake too, from the Hill. My mom’s side, Italian and white as ricotta, which none of us fucked with, was in love with the Hill. All Italians were. The neighborhood was a vestige of Providence’s wiseguy past—bakeries that sold out of everything but spinach pies by noon, courtyard fountains that ran water on Sundays crowded with scamorza-faced nonnas. All the family on my mom’s side were headed for that fate—all women, and all with scowls heavy enough to knock your eyes away. There were two blood uncles too, but one was dead, and Vinny didn’t live in the state and nobody talked about him.

  With Madie out of town, my long-ago ex, Kalli, had come to the party with me and was looking at the cake the same way I clocked her body—like she was thirsty and the cake was a tallboy before close in the kitchen. She wore a loose orange shirt and tight white shorts that made her brown skin look edible everywhere in between. My aunts flashed glances at the clothes their skin tone wouldn’t let them get away with, though maybe my auntie Mary could’ve—she showed the most Bari in her blood. Maybe my nonna when she was younger. I watched her take a slice of cheese from an antipasto plate in the making. Her skin was paler now, her back curving, giving in to gravity.

  Kalli and I had been on and off since high school. Her mom had showed mine how to make stewed oxtail, even took her to the one grocery store that sold cuts of it for cheap, attached to the only Jamaican restaurant in the city, off Broad Street.

  In the seven years since we’d graduated, we’d grown apart—not enough to talk about who we were fucking or loving, like we were actually grown, but enough to know not to ask. I shouldn’t have been thinking any of these things anyway, because my girlfriend, Madie, was on a train back from her family’s summer home in Connecticut and she didn’t deserve that.

  “Go get a slice,” I told Kalli.

  She surveyed the patio like there were cake operatives involved. But it was just my family and she knew them well.

  “We haven’t even had dinner,” she said.

  “It’s a fucking cookout. Not a gala.”

  She cut her eyes at me but turned back to the cake. Meanwhile, my family moved around the patio setting out food in the September heat that was trying to act like it was still July.

  I imagined Madie, every long blue-blooded inch of her, drinking and twirling and helping my aunts with the party, throwing slight shots at me to get on my mom’s good side. I should’ve gone to her family estate for Labor Day weekend, but in truth, her parents were the type of white folks who try too hard, tell you how much they love Obama, get self-righteous when they talk shit about stop-and-frisk. I hadn’t known Connecticut had country before I met Madie. I hadn’t known a lot of things about rich folks. I liked the way she broke finance down in layman’s terms. I liked waking up next to her. I told myself that she hadn’t inherited all the rest.

  Some of my boys’ families had left Pawtucket for Hartford or New Haven, but one moved to Danielson. That place is the sticks though. Madie’s parents’ place in the country is all the way across the state and the feel is different. When I visited my boy in Danielson, back in high school, people sat around the same as we did. My boys and I chopped it up with some Laotians who danced better than we did and smoked more too. At a party up that way, I got it in with a girl who wore gold-trimmed Air Forces and whose friend came to get her halfway through but ended up just watching us finish.

  Years later, when I first saw Madie’s parents’ place in Salisbury, it was like the sun set for only us, lowering itself slow behind the hills, throwing different shades into the sky to preserve our silence. The land made you say corny shit like that. That’s the difference between country and sticks. Country is manicured, made pretty for someone. Sticks just happen and you drive through them quick or stop to get gas and look around at folks suffocating the same as the people you came up with. Or maybe I was wrong about it all, but grocery shopping at the corner store is a bad look regardless. Maybe you’re like me and your boys used to think your spot was a palace because it had two bedrooms and only two people.

  When we stayed in the country, Madie and I had our quiet moments when her parents weren’t there, planning days around each other, doing our own thing and drifting back together, enjoying our own orbit. When night finally came, we’d go back inside. She’d head up the front stairs while I moved into the kitchen to crack a beer. After a few sips, I’d go up the side stairs to find her waiting. There was always more than one way to go in her homes—more doors than in a Scooby-Doo chase scene.

  Dub had made it out to Madie’s for a huge Fourth of July party a little over a year back. He knew some of the people I went to college with from a weekend in the city with me. He slipped away from the party at some point, though, and almost a full day later I found him in town with his shirt torn and bloody. I asked if he’d walked and he asked for eggs. I bought him breakfast. Dub was extra, it’s true, but I didn’t think my Cornell people gave him a fair shake. They were used to house-hand types.

  At Madie’s he’d heard me talking about some of the new music I’d been listening to. Sitting at that heartland diner, he asked me what the fuck I’d done on Vampire Weekend, not realizing it was a band name. Then he spat in his water glass and fell asleep in the booth. I’d been trying to make amends in the few years since shit had gone south between us in the city. But we’d only gotten worse.

  I hadn’t seen him since the previous fall when we ended up throwing hands at our boy’s apartment. Laughing on my aunt’s patio now, trying not to sweat, I felt the distance.

  KALLI WAS A few wines deep and eating the cake with her hands and I was loving her for that. Until recently, I’d still been able to get her wet and make her laugh. Even with the series of minor and major heartbreaks I’d dealt her through the years, we still had a pulse from before. But since she’d been home, she’d been brushing me off, probably because she knew about Madie the way millennials know about the Cold War.

  “Lili-bear?”

  She threw some shade my way.

  “My likkle beef patty,” I said, to no response.

  We were in our mid-twenties, on that self-defining bullshit, but her face still looked high-school-young. She slumped into the patio furniture and her thighs billowed along the edges of her white shorts. She caught me looking and shook her finger like Dikembe Mutombo. Even though she was there to catch up with my family, wearing those shorts was no accident.

  Still, she was right. I shouldn’t have been looking. My mind wandered back to Madie sitting with her family on their veranda by the pool. The place I should’ve been. But her parents always asked me about the mayor of New York and I could never tell if they meant to ask me about his high-yaller family or his policy, so usually I came out sounding like an idiot. The only way that would change was if I was around them more.

  Kalli crossed her legs. The family-time fantasy drowned with the swiftness. I got up and moved a folding chair closer to her, draped an awkward arm across her shoulders. They felt small under me.

  “You thought,” she said and moved my arm off.

  Even leaning away from me, she smelled good, a little too sweet, but if I licked her neck I’d taste the salt. When we had first started dating, her mom would bring over gizzada and sit with my mom and nonna downstairs, listening closely while Kalli and I “studied” in my room. My bed was too loud to have sex on, so we’d move to the floor, though there wasn’t much of it in that old house, and go slow so I had to look in her eyes and smell the perfume and sweat on her neck, which is probably how I caught feelings in the first place.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.
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  She moved her plate. She’d peeled the frosting off, and it was in chunks everywhere. Then her eyes found the sky, the house, the trees, the other guests, the sun, really anything but my face.

  “You got a new man?” I tried to smile.

  She didn’t, I hoped. I hadn’t seen her in months. We’d talked on the phone now and again, but she hadn’t been home much since I’d moved back. I’d explained to Madie that we were just friends, and that was true. She’d told me about the protests and rallies she’d been a part of. I didn’t know if it was to brag or just to shoot the shit and avoid the personal.

  “No new niggas,” I sang.

  She mean-mugged me. She wasn’t about that word. Back in the day, she’d told me that her family never threw nigga around. I told her, If you’re black in America for long enough, it’s hard not to start. I had some friends from college that used the word like a blanket, for punctuation in mixed company, for armor. My mom’s side had never heard me talk that way, never heard the way my boys and I passed it around like a dutch, all of us wrapped in it.

  “Do you really want to know?” Kalli said.

  I looked out at the trees lining the property. Two acres of English-garden-style high grass rolled out from Sammy’s porch. A few young trees were staked to keep them safe from storms. The oaks in Madie’s parents’ yard had been there for centuries. I wondered if folks hunted near my aunt’s here in Warwick. It was still early for geese, but they’d be gearing up in Ithaca. Some days I thought about moving back, but Madie had made it clear that it’d be the end of our thing. Plus, I was in a good kitchen in Cranston, learning under the Montalbanos, Rhode Island restaurant royalty.

  Eddy flipped some meat on the grill in front of us. My auntie Liza put a glass cover over the cake and Kalli set her plate of crumbs down. My mom mixed a drink she didn’t need—she was small and new to booze in general. But having always been the black sheep among her own kin, she was greasing the wheels. I could understand that.

  “’Cause I’ll tell you if you really want to know,” Kalli said.

  Eddy started yelling like he was battling the six-burner Weber. The sausage smelled good but it was just the fat dripping. His dumb ass was trying to cook the links on high like they were fucking steaks. He hadn’t even slit them and I waited for them to pop and burn. He was talking about his job and how no one knew how tough it was. He transitioned into the loaded weapons he kept around the house. “Everyone wants to be a cop killer,” he said. “Go to the Dominican parade and watch how they look at me.”

  My uncles kept talking open and loud. They were heavy in the sauce by then and didn’t notice Kalli and me listening.

  Uncle Bill, Liza’s husband, nodded. He was rich-person fat, before you get so much money that you get skinny again, and wore an open silk shirt. “They turn every dead man into a saint,” he said.

  Kalli looked across her face at me.

  I shrugged. “Family.”

  Sammy offered some antipasto, but Eddy waved her away. She looked at him like he was her tenant.

  Kalli was silent and I could see my image wilting in her eyes, which was twisted because I’d never judged her for her crazy-ass relatives. Families come with bullshit, everybody knows that. I imagined my younger sister, Whitney, throwing some shots at Eddy. But at sixteen, she wasn’t truly indignant. She used race more as a weapon to make white folks back down. Plus it was a Labor Day cookout and I didn’t feel like going on a Black Power crusade. I wondered if Jamaican holidays were as bloody as American ones. I was cotton-mouthed, wanted a beer. But my mom was standing by the cooler and I didn’t want to hear about it later. Plus, she was giving Kalli and me space. I didn’t know if it was courtesy or because she’d never gotten over Kalli and hoped the time alone would rekindle us. Kalli’s eyes were cutting. She’d always made me stand up straight and I didn’t want to lose that.

  “I’m going to get some wine,” she said. “Want anything?”

  “Yeah, get my dashiki off the rack.”

  She gave me the finger, then fixed her shorts and left.

  SOMETIMES I WISHED Dub had never introduced us. All week, since she’d been in town, Kalli and I had chopped it up about our high-school days, but at a distance, like we were no longer in on the same jokes. I’d been stuck on how things had gone down between Dub and me. All she said was, People change. I even got a shape-up at Atomic, the shop we used to go to for cuts. It’d been a long time and none of the barbers knew my name anymore.

  Kalli came back with white wine filled too high in her glass. She swung her hips forward more than walked—sexy, but unsteady-looking. I fixed my eyes on my phone to avoid staring.

  Madie’s last message read Be home soon, dear. I hated when she used that fifties slang with me. It was her way of writing off whatever I had to say. I thought about our life together—almost a year now. We’d been together for two, but sharing a bathroom is when it gets serious. The worst of getting to know each other was over. She had some lactose intolerance, but nothing a thick blanket couldn’t solve. She loved the Kings of Leon and would definitely fuck the lead singer if given the chance, but nothing could solve that, everyone’s got some crush. I imagined Josephine Baker in that banana skirt often. One of my boys once told me, Never think you got someone’s heart on lock, there is always a nigga with a spare key. Later I found out Pac said it first. As far as Madie’s faults, I couldn’t think of much else. She broke the world into lists of pros and cons and neat angles. But everything tended to blend together for me, so we worked well enough. Kalli liked to make lists too, but she also yelled in public and was forward with strangers, some shit Madie would never do. I missed that. I wondered how I measured up to Madie’s exes. If I was the type to go through her shit, I’m sure I could’ve found a neatly written list.

  Kalli sat down in a different lawn chair across from me and took a deep swallow, swished the wine like a marathon runner, only she didn’t spit it back out.

  “That glass family-style?” I said.

  “Do you get your jokes off cereal boxes?” she said.

  “Nah, I get them from your blog.”

  She stoned up at that. She wrote, time to time, for a “New Black” website and had her own social justice Tumblr.

  “Kuul yu fut, Queen Nzinga. I’m fucking with you.” I pulled the glass from her hand and sipped heavy. It tasted awful. White wine always did. I gave it back.

  Kalli ignored me and checked her phone. She was too far away for me to see the screen. The wineglass looked oversize in her other hand. The light from her phone was bright enough to show a zit smothered in makeup on the right side of her chin. Auntie Lucy had lit tiki torches to keep the mosquitoes away. They didn’t work for shit but looked good in the fading light.

  “Important text?” I said.

  Kalli sipped her wine again and said nothing. She didn’t know how serious Madie and I had gotten, and I was sure she wasn’t without.

  “He ain’t better-looking than me,” I said.

  She put down her wine and held her pointer fingers about a foot apart.

  “Lyin’ ass,” I said.

  “Fine, don’t believe me.”

  “Don’t say that shit. It’s a holiday.” I grabbed my dick. “Plus you love Richard, don’t lie.”

  “First off, Labor Day isn’t a real holiday,” she said. “And keep telling yourself that.”

  “Links are up,” Eddy said.

  My family liquored up. Eddy’s mom and sister, Sheila and Dela, drank Sambuca and spoke Greek to each other. We waited by the grill for the meat, then Kalli and I sat down across from each other at the enormous dining table on the patio. The table was big enough to seat fourteen, like Sammy was trying to one-up the Last Supper. An arrangement of fresh flowers sat in the center like a picture straight out of a home magazine. My mom grew peonies, and I was proud of her for making us a home. I leaned forward and touched the soft, off-white petals but didn’t know what they were. I wasn’t the type to know what bloomed in Se
ptember. Even if I were, I would’ve lied. The table probably cost more than all her furniture combined.

  “Who moves this in the winter?” I looked at the table legs, Serena Williams thick.

  Eddy said they would just refinish it in the fall and tarp it down. He was a loud son of a bitch.

  “Hurricanes?” I said.

  “A hurricane isn’t budging this.”

  Kalli chewed loud on some cocktail shrimp and I hoped she’d get drunk enough to forget we weren’t in high school anymore. I wished I could live what we had again, but I knew there was no salvation in it, no simplicity.

  Kalli sucked the tails out of their shells like no one was watching, used her fingers and teeth to pry them open. She was sitting next to my mom, who was asking about her law-school applications, wide-eyed, like Kalli’s words were the elixir of youth. I imagined Kalli in a sundress, her hair straightened, a woman to worship. The fabric would hide her body, make her look smaller. Madie was tall. She had pictures from her older sister’s wedding, where she’d been a bridesmaid. The dress was turquoise and didn’t read well on her pale skin, but she was beautiful anyway—it seemed the photographer had pumped the sun with extra light, and her eyes with extra blue. She looked ready to step into a horse-drawn carriage, her long brown hair pulled back and shining. When black folks say we’re kings and queens, I wonder how many of us imagine white faces.

  I checked my phone to see if Madie had texted again.

  “Put that away!” my nonna said. She smiled, then started in on the sausage, ripping through the casing like string cheese.

  “Hey, hey, we didn’t say grace!”

  Everyone turned to my aunt Liza, the youngest of my mom’s four sisters.

  “Go ahead, Brown Bear,” she said.

  Kalli cocked her head at me.

  “Damn, Auntie, it’s a cookout, not Easter.”

  “Just say the goddamned grace,” Eddy said.

  “Eddy!”

  “Eddy!”