by Xenia Ruiz
Unlike my father, I had defied the odds in so many ways. After my last chemo course, when my blood tests, CT scan, and chest X-rays all came back negative, the doctors were so stunned that the cancer was in remission without surgery, they presented my case at a medical teaching conference. The fact that the kind of cancer I had was rare in Black men made me an even bigger anomaly. I attributed my recovery to God and a rededication to prayer. But sometime in the last year, I had drifted away. And like all sinners who called on God only in times of need, I felt kind of bad about it—but not bad enough to believe I needed to go to church on a regular basis. I was a biannual Christian, the kind who went to church on Christmas and Easter—the Lord’s birth and resurrection. I was going on the notion that by attending church on these two holiest-of-holy days, the eternal fires would remain out of reach.
Two cops on bike patrol pedaled by and almost immediately my anger returned. A few years back, a cop wouldn’t be caught dead riding anything that didn’t run on gas, but as tourism increased, the mayor decided the city could not risk losing the growing revenue. Thus began the recruitment of younger, trimmer cops to patrol the city’s parks and beaches. It amazed me how quickly crime fighting became a priority when economics was involved and especially when it came to certain segments of the population.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to lose me.”
I looked up and saw the woman runner I had left in the dust several blocks back. She was breathing hard, her chest heaving, and I realized just how young she was, probably in her early twenties.
“I was timing myself,” I told her, tapping my stopwatch.
She nodded and straddled the back of the bench, her thighs within inches of my face. “I’m Zina,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Adam.” I took her hand.
We talked a little about running and as I speculated, she was quite young, only twenty, in her last year at DePaul. At one point, she picked up one of my locks and said, “I just love dreadlocks.” I found that usually it was White women who made false adulation comments, but I didn’t take it as a compliment. Women like her thought being with a man with dreadlocks was something unique, like it was supposed to be different from being with a man with a conventional hairstyle. They would ask foolish questions like, “Do you wash it?” or “Is it real?” But cancer had made my senses more acute and I was able to smell superficiality and bull that I might have otherwise ignored. The warning lights started going off in my head: Danger, Danger! I knew she was flirting with me, but after a while, we ran out of conversation. She got up and stretched, causing her crop top to ride up and reveal a tight belly and a Winnie the Pooh tattoo. I tried not to let the desire in my eyes show, but judging by the smile on her face, I didn’t think I was successful.
“Well, since you haven’t asked for my number, I’m going to assume you’re involved or not interested.”
I didn’t want to seem rude or like I was scared off by her age. “Neither,” I said truthfully. “I don’t have a pen or anything.”
She pulled a pen out of her fanny pack, took my hand, and wrote her number in my palm. Then she smiled and turned. I watched her walk away until she was a gold-and-white dot in the horizon.
The drops came softly and slowly at first, but people were already packing up and hurrying for cover as if bombs were dropping from the sky. Lightning flashed above, followed by crashing thunder. A woman screamed as she ran over the grass. I shook my head. It’s not that serious, I thought. The sudden shower fell quickly in layers, soaking everything within minutes, including me. I leaned back and let the rainfall cleanse me.
CHAPTER 3
EVA
I WAS IN the garden pruning my rosebushes near the wooden privacy fence when I believed I was truly losing my mind. I had sensed a presence behind me, so I turned to the spot where the huge oak tree stood in the middle of the yard; I saw a man instead. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me and I did a double take. There stood a muscular man with a chiseled torso and two brawny arms holding up a huge, magnificent Afro made of leaves, like Mr. Universe holding up the globe. He seemed to be calling me, thrusting his chest out, tempting me like a forbidden tree. It seemed like a sign from God, a preview of the man who was waiting for me. For a moment, I escaped my body and floated toward him, dropping the shears along the way and collapsing at the man’s feet. I couldn’t see his face for all the hair tumbling from his head, so I began grabbing at the leaves, tearing at the branches left and right. However, the more I pulled, the more obscure the man’s face became.
“Ow!”
Awakened from my trance, I looked down at my hand where a thorn had pierced my gloveless finger. Instinctively, I brought it to my mouth and sucked at the blood. I knew it was God who had interfered with my licentious daydream, slapping me back to the reality of working in my garden on a beautiful summer day, not lusting after a man who wasn’t really there.
Still sucking my finger, I turned back to the object of my brief desire and saw that it was a tree once again and not a man. No muscles, no Afro, just an illusion of bark and leaves.
I walked around the yard, picking up loose twigs and branches that had snapped in the turbulent summer storm the night before. Judging by the clouds, it looked like it was going to rain again. Lately, since the boys left for school, I couldn’t help but think about how quickly the last twenty years of my life had flown by.
After graduation, when I was nineteen, I ran into my first and only high school boyfriend. He had put his hand on my behind on our first date, making that our last. After we reminisced and laughed about the incident that had broken us up, we got reacquainted and soon fell in love. Anthony had joined the army after graduation and was about to leave for boot camp. Whether I was feeling left out because of my younger sister’s and best friend’s marriages, I couldn’t say, but I married him nonetheless and followed him to North Carolina and joined the Reserves to earn money for college. When I became pregnant a year later, quite unexpectedly, I was thrilled; Anthony was not. He thought it was too soon. Then Eli followed just before Tony’s first birthday and I was forced to quit college. That and Anthony’s numerous affairs put a strain on the marriage, but we held on for six years before we ended it for good and I returned to Chicago.
After my divorce from Mr. Anthony Prince, I found myself juggling a full-time job, going to school part-time while raising our two young sons. I tried to stay away from men after my divorce, but like many women, it was hard for me to be without male companionship. My relationships with men became more guarded after Anthony. I established a six-month rule before I engaged in sex. Condoms were a must, but of course, like always, there were times when they were inconvenient. As long as I didn’t get pregnant, I was secure. I found myself bouncing from one relationship to the next. One man seemed satisfied with my six-month rule, but when he realized I was serious, he left. His departing words stung for a long time: “I can’t believe I wasted three months of my life with you.”
And then I met Victor.
He was an English college instructor of Venezuelan descent whose pastime was volunteering at homeless shelters. Divorced, with no children, he was the most romantic man I had ever known, always surprising me with flowers and silly gifts before the typical traditional holidays. A patient, sensitive man, he became an instant father to Tony and Eli, who were teenagers in need of discipline. With his encouragement and assistance, I re-enrolled in college and finished my bachelor’s. Victor introduced me to the benefits of boxing and healthy eating, and he helped me slim down. I thought he was too perfect, anticipating the day I would find out some ugly secret, or he would cheat on me. But other than his obsession with his motorcycle, and his bad habit of gratuitous swearing, there didn’t seem to be anything I couldn’t live with. I became convinced that he was “the one.” We got engaged, moved in together, and set a wedding date.
Then everything fell apart.
While addressing the wedding invitatio
ns, a woman called to tell me she was having an affair with my almost-perfect fiancé. I was stunned and humiliated, but I was more hurt than anything. When I confronted Victor, he accused me of being unfaithful. Prior experience told me that when men did that, it was to appease their own guilt. He finally admitted that the affair had lasted only a month and when he tried to break it off, the woman became obsessive and threatened to call me. What made it even worse was why he did it. “It just happened,” he said, the dumbest, weakest excuse known to man. We tried counseling and I tried to forgive him, but it didn’t happen.
My sister urged me not to lose faith in men. Not all men cheat, was her motto. After all, I wasn’t perfect. No, I told her, but I was faithful. Trust had always, would always, be a big thing with me. And then one day Maya saw her minivan in the parking lot of a Metra station and found Alex inside having sex with another woman. In the aftermath of his infidelity, she became my one true comrade. All men cheat—eventually, was her revised motto. Simone was more optimistic; she believed there were men who didn’t, though she had not found him yet and had had her fair share of married and involved men. Deep down, she truly believed she would one day find her soul mate. Maya was already convinced she had found him in Luciano. While I shared Simone’s belief that there were men who didn’t cheat, I didn’t necessarily believe in the concept of soul mates.
That was five years ago. Soon after, my self-imposed celibacy began. I succeeded in making myself happy and busy, suppressing my desire for the one thing I felt was missing from my life. In the past five years, I had come a long way, accomplishing more in my life than most people seemed to take half a lifetime to do.
During those years, I searched for my spirituality and found it in the kind of church I had sought all my life. The Community Church of Christ was a place of worship that stressed community outreach more than the collection of offerings, which was done via mail once a month instead of during Sunday service. After giving my life to Christ, I began to rely more on asking and waiting rather than wishing and hoping. For almost everything I prayed, I received. What I didn’t receive, I believed I didn’t need. I prayed for help in getting my master’s degree in administration and, after applying for several scholarships, I won one that paid everything. When I asked for guidance in my future endeavors, my prayers were answered after I interviewed for a position at Chicago University as a student advisor. In a few years, I rose through the ranks and became the first female director of Latino Student Recruitment.
For now, I was fulfilled with my life and the challenge of working in the garden of my new home. My dream had been to own a home where my sons could play in a big yard instead of on city sidewalks, but they were sixteen and seventeen by the time I was able to purchase a house. My recent goal was to have my garden completed before the summer’s end. So far I had completed the landscaping along the sides of the yard by bricking the edges, planting hostas, and enclosing them with whitewashed marble chips. Near the newly constructed deck, I had planted tulips, which had bloomed earlier in the year, along with roses, mums, and other perennials. At the end of the yard where other neighbors had garages, I had cemented a portion for the boys’ mini-basketball court, although now they were rarely home to use it. My last project was a miniature greenhouse, which would house the tropical plants of my mother’s birthplace.
I tried to convince myself that the reason I had devoted so much time to my garden was not because I wanted to take my mind away from turning forty a couple of weeks before, or from the fact that I was about to enter my fifth year of celibacy, but because gardens always reminded me of my mother. On the tree stump in one corner of the basketball court, I stopped and read the inscription: “Eva’s Garden of Eden—Dedicated to Amarylis Clemente.”
My mother, Amarylis, had been an amateur horticulturist and was appropriately named after a flower. Although we had lived in apartments, my mother always grew plants and flowers everywhere, with a garden on every porch, open or enclosed. In the last apartment we had lived in before her death, a garden apartment, the landlord had allowed her to have a garden in the small yard. My mother had turned it into a paradise of colorful and vibrant flora. The beauty and intricacy of that last garden the summer I was fifteen was overshadowed by my mother’s untimely death caused by a brain aneurysm. As always when I thought of my mother, I could not help but think of my father, who, distraught over his wife’s death, pawned my sister and me off to my mother’s sister, Titi. In the three years before I became of legal age, Joaquin Clemente came to visit us sporadically like a divorced father, never speaking of our mother and becoming more and more distant as the years went by.
A part of me surmised that if I mended the frayed pieces of my relationship with my father, I could resolve my predicament with men. Over the years I tried to reestablish a relationship with my father who seemed content to live year after year without speaking to his daughters or grandsons unless contacted first. But the father I had known as a child had yet to resurface.
I heard the phone ringing inside, but I didn’t move to answer it. I didn’t like being disturbed when I was in the garden, so I waited for the voice mail to kick in.
It was only in the last year that everything seemed to fall into place after I was finally able to convince Eli, who wanted to join the air force, to follow in his older brother’s footsteps at Illinois South University. For the first time in my life, I found myself alone and at peace.
Just then, King barked and momentarily startled me out of my introspection, as if to remind me that I wasn’t alone. A car zoomed down the alley and King bounded after it to the length of the wrought-iron fence, barking as if his jaws could penetrate it if only I would let him.
“King!” I commanded. “¡Callate!” Immediately, King stopped barking and sprang toward me and circled my legs meekly. I patted his smooth coat until he relaxed at my feet. My finger was still bleeding, and I walked to the hose and stuck it under the water flow.
Yes, God had been good to me. He had answered all my prayers—except one. While I had taken charge of many aspects of my life, I had never stopped asking for a man of God to come into my life. Maya and Simone tried to set me up several times, sometimes with Christian men, sometimes not. None held my interest. Either they were too much like siblings or I discerned something in their spirit that told me to run in the opposite direction—fast. I had been in church long enough to know that God answered prayers on His own time and not anyone else’s, so I tried to be patient. Then again, maybe He had already sent a man in the form of one of the brothers in the church and I had spurned him before they could reveal themselves. Maybe I had run into “him” in the past few years, at the post office or walking down the street. For all I knew it could be Johnny Estevez, the co-leader in the Youth Ministry, who had asked me out for the third time at the last youth meeting. And for the third time, I had turned him down. Not only because he was eight years younger, but mostly because I wasn’t attracted to him. And whoever heard of a grown man going by his childhood nickname anyway?
Then I thought of Rashid Ali, the director of African American admissions at the university.
Rashid was a divorced father of two preteen girls, a man I had been attracted to since he first arrived at CU six months ago. He had a great sense of humor and kept me laughing through all the academic bureaucracy and pettiness of office politics. During staff meetings, we would pass notes back and forth as if we were in high school. A few months after he started, I agreed to go to a staff party with him, even though I knew we were of different faiths. Whether it was the festive atmosphere or a mutual lack of companionship, sparks flew. As we were dancing, he asked me if I would be willing to convert to Islam and I replied, “Only if you convert to Christianity.” We laughed and resolved to be friends after that. Every once in a while, however, I sensed something more than friendship toward him, which made me wonder if I was meant to come into his life and convert him.
When the phone rang again a few minutes later, I reluc
tantly walked inside and answered it just before the voice mail could kick in.
“Mother, where were you?” Tony demanded. Over the years, I had gone from Mama to Mommy to Ma. Only when they were angry or condescending did my children refer to me as Mother.
“In the garden.” I hunted the kitchen drawers for a bandage.
“Why don’t you take the phone with you?” he chastised me, as if I were the child. “It’s cordless. It reaches out there.” Tony had appointed himself my protector, taking over the man-of-the-house role after his father left, a role he refused to relinquish when Victor moved in, then resumed after we broke up.
“Don’t speak to me like I’m not up on technology,” I admonished him. “You know I don’t like talking on the phone outside. It’s so uncouth.”
“Oh, brother.”
“Speaking of which, have you seen him?”
“Eli? Once, at the bookstore. You know we’re on opposite sides of the campus.”
It gave me a sense of relief that my children were together, even though they were miles away downstate in Carter, Illinois. When they were little, they were never really close, although they were almost a year apart like Maya and I. They fought constantly, verbally and physically, into their teenage years. Ironically, it wasn’t until Tony went away for his freshman year that they began to form a bond.
“What’s all that noise?” Tony asked.
“I’m looking for a bandage,” I said, opening another drawer. “I pricked my finger.” I finally found a Band-Aid with a deteriorated wrapping, but the bandage itself was still fresh. “Please keep an eye on your brother,” I reminded him. “I don’t want him messing with those college girls, interfering with his studies. You know how he is.”