by Xenia Ruiz
“You’re the one who’s making your dentist rich,” Mama said shrugging, eyeing my sister from bottom to top as she cut up the cantaloupe.
“You look good, baby sister,” I commented to get her on my side. I set the kids down so they could divert their grandmother’s attention with more hugs and kisses.
Mama stopped cutting in order to bend to her grandbabies’ level. In the midst of their affectionate exchange, she looked up at Jade. “What is that on your nose?”
Jade and I looked at each other. I hadn’t noticed the tiny stud in her nose. It was barely noticeable but she might as well have had a hoop ring hanging out of her nostril under Mama’s radar. Your turn, I related telepathically Jade scowled and shoved a piece of cantaloupe into her mouth. “A nose ring,” she mumbled.
Mama shook her head, but said nothing more. This was typical Mama, storing ammunition for surprise assaults. “Your brother’s seeing a Puerto Rican woman,” she then said.
“Mama …” I warned.
“What’s a Putta Weeken?” Kia asked.
We all burst out laughing.
“It’s someone who’s from Puerto Rico, a country,” I explained to my precocious niece, picking her up and kissing her cheek.
“Oh,” Kia said, nodding with total comprehension.
“Jade, baby. Have you decided to stop dressing like a decent woman now that your husband has left you?” Mama asked, now turning back to Jade. Despite Jade’s annoyance, I grinned, happy once again that my mother was off my back.
When I returned home, there was a voice mail message from Ms. Miller asking me to call her back right away. “It’s about Justin,” she said before hanging up. I sighed, wondering what Justin had done now. Before I called her, I put a couple of Maze and Brian Hughes CDs on the stereo and took a shower. When I was finally relaxing in a T-shirt and boxers, I felt prepared for any drama Ms. Miller would dish out.
“Ms. Miller. What’s going on?” I asked authoritatively.
“Justin didn’t go to work. I called his job and his boss said he phoned in sick. None of his friends have seen him and his cell phone is turned off,” she said quietly. She had called before with the same complaint; the first time she told me Justin hadn’t come home from school. I was new to the game and went to her house, only to find her dressed in a short black dress, claiming she had just come in from a date to find Justin gone—Ricky was spending the night at a friend’s. She was slightly drunk and crying, upset that a date had stood her up. When she tried to make a move on me, I left. Later, I found out from Justin that she had insisted he spend the night at a cousin’s.
“What about the girl? What’s her name? Diane?”
“Her phone’s disconnected. I’d go to her house if I knew where she lived. She has a car, can you believe it? A sixteen-year-old girl with a car? She has a cell phone, but I don’t know the number.”
“It’s only eight o’clock. It’s still early. If he isn’t home by ten, call me back.”
“I’m getting worried. Can you come over?”
Big Brothers weren’t supposed to get emotionally involved in the lives of their charges, I reminded myself every time. And we definitely were not supposed to get involved with the mothers. We were supposed to help with homework, transport the boys to extracurricular activities, be more like big brothers than fathers—hence the name. But it was a difficult task in a society full of divorced and fatherless families. At orientation, the program director told the new recruits a story of a mentor who fell in love with his protégé’s mother. When the love affair was over, the mother became angry and began to stalk the mentor, who eventually had to file a restraining order. She then began taking out her frustration on her son and eventually lost custody of him. It was an extreme case but an example of what could happen when bounds were overstepped.
“No, I can’t,” I told her. “Just call me back at ten, okay?”
When ten o’clock rolled around and Ms. Miller hadn’t called, I called her, but the phone was busy. I worked at the computer a bit, checked my e-mails, then searched the Internet for a local screen-writing contest someone at work told me about. I was beginning to take my creative writing more seriously, determined to finish my screenplay by year’s end. After I located the website and downloaded the information, I called Ms. Miller again. The phone was still busy so I went to bed.
Just as I had fallen asleep, the phone awoke me.
“Adam—Mr. Black, it’s Nikki. Nikki Miller.” Her voice sounded shaky.
“What’s wrong?” I squinted in the dark at the digital clock radio: 12:05.
“Justin hasn’t come home. He hasn’t called. His cell phone is still off—”
“Hold on, hold on,” I said, still half asleep. I struggled out of bed and snapped on the light.
“I don’t know what to do. Should I call the police?”
“I’ll be right there.”
On the drive over, I tried not to think of the worst-case scenario. Ordinarily, I didn’t notice Justin and Ricky’s neighborhood, but at twelve-forty-five in the morning it amazed me how alive it was—the young brothers on the corners, the constant flow of traffic, drug deals in plain sight as cop cars drove by blatantly oblivious. It was still a nice neighborhood, predominantly full of hardworking and retired Black folks, and I could only imagine what the poorer neighborhoods were like. I drove slowly, glancing periodically at the young men for a glimpse of Justin’s familiar hair, his slightly bow-legged walk, even though I knew he wasn’t the hanging-out kind. Times like this made me glad I wasn’t a father.
When I got to the Millers’ house, I halfway expected another trap—dinner and a bottle of wine, topped off with a lonely single mother in a hot dress. Instead I found Ms. Miller distraught, a scarf tied around her head, wearing what looked like her son’s clothes: baggy jeans and a T-shirt.
“He hasn’t called. He always calls, even if it’s to lie about where he is.”
“Did you two have a fight or something?”
“We’re always fighting these days. Yesterday, he told me he was going away to college and never coming to visit me.”
“He was just angry, he didn’t mean it.”
“He said he hated me.”
It was an ugly thing to hate a parent. It was like hating yourself, like hating God. I knew because this was the disease that lived in me and had been eating at my insides. It was like the cancer that had tried to thrive in my body. However, the hate had been more successful. What I felt for my dead father was immune to forgiveness like radiation and chemotherapy was to terminal cancer.
“Kids say those things just to hurt their parents, but they don’t mean what they say.” I tried to assure her, though I knew it was indeed possible for kids to hate their parents.
I listened as she talked about how hard it had been to be a single mother after her husband died, how careful she had to be about dating, how hard it was for a woman with needs. I should’ve taken the hint and bolted, but I wanted to make sure Justin made it home safely.
“Men pretend like they’re interested in me, you know. They think I’m desperate because I have two kids and I want to find a daddy for them and that I’ll do anything, put up with anything, just to have a man in my life. But I’m waiting for someone special,” she went on.
Yeah, so am I, I thought. But I am not the one. I could feel her eyes eating away at me, piece by piece, and I scratched the back of my neck out of habit. Even though I was sitting across from her, I was on edge and got up and walked to the window just in time to see Justin exiting a gray car.
“He’s here,” I announced, a little too happily.
She rushed to the door. “I’m going to kill him!”
I put out my arm and held her back. “That’s what he wants. To get a rise out of you. Don’t let him. Let me talk to him.”
At my father’s funeral, almost twenty years ago, I remembered standing at his coffin, fighting back the urge with all my might to keep from pounding on his chest. I wanted to
bring him back to life so I could choke it right back out of him. How dare he cheat on my beautiful, God-fearing mother who always saw the good in everyone. I thought, it would have been easier to understand if she had been a bad wife and mother—no, not even then. On the rare occasions when we dared to talk back or be disobedient, Mama would quote Ephesians 6:2, Honor thy mother and thy father … that thy may enjoy long life on earth.
When I looked over at the section where the family members were assembled, I saw the other woman, a Caucasian woman, and her two children, sitting directly behind my mother and sister. The combination of my father’s long-ago mixed genes and the White woman’s had produced almost White children. The girl was about my age—I later learned eight months younger—with long, wavy dishwater blonde hair and pale skin. The boy was even more pallid, almost albino, with lighter, straighter hair. He was closer to Jade’s age, by five months. It wasn’t until years later, when my cancer was diagnosed, after the doctors told me how rare it was in African Americans, that I thought about my father’s great-grandfather, the German immigrant who was rarely mentioned when talk turned to the ancestors. “The German,” as he was referred to by the family, was the one who had passed down his light eyes and light skin on to my father, and possibly, his cancerous genes, which in turn, were transmitted to me.
The day of the funeral, I recalled everyone whispering around us, or so it seemed. If pointing were an acceptable thing to do at a funeral, the fingers would have been all over us. As it was, the eyes and chins were doing a good job of indicating the scandal unfolding at the front of the parlor. I heard my mother call me, her voice swollen with grief and exhaustion. She said, “Adam-Love, come meet your brother and sister.” Jade, at eleven years old, had not grasped the depth of their relationship to us and was talking to them like they were long-lost cousins. I whirled around and looked at my mother with such vehemence that she recoiled as if I had hit her. Then I turned and walked out of the church without delivering the eulogy. In my head was the poem I had written and memorized for my father, about his life as a father, a navy man and my hero. But I laid the words to rest and never resurrected them again. I didn’t go to the burial, and at seventeen I swore that I would never visit his grave. Ever.
CHAPTER 11
EVA
FIVE YEARS. I had waited for a man like him for five years. And just when I had decided to give up, there he was, standing in front of me, regal like a Black prince with locks the color of dark sand, eyes the color of night, reciting spiritual poetry like biblical verses. It was Adam. He had to be the one.
At least that’s what my heart was telling me as I watched him take the podium with an air of confidence associated with success. The tunic he wore blended with his golden skin tone and clung impeccably to each muscle and hard line on his torso. A long duster and loose slacks, both in black, completed his ensemble, shrouding his lower contours in mystery so that the rest of him had to be quickly reconstructed in the Etch A Sketch of my imagination. It was an outfit an eccentric man would wear, like an artist. He wore it like a king.
Now at the microphone, he adjusted his thin-rimmed, amber-colored glasses, which I could tell were for show because he had no broken refraction along his cheekbones where the bottoms of the lenses rested.
“Uhh,” Simone grunted with approval. “He don’t look like no Christian.”
“Don’t judge,” I whispered to silence her.
She nudged me hard. “You like ‘heem,’” she teased in a fake Jamaican accent.
She was right, Adam did seem out of his element, like he belonged at Words, the coffeehouse in Printer’s Row where weekly secular poetry slams were held. And she was right, I did like him. His locks were tied back, cascading down his back like a horse’s tail. A few locks spilled from his forehead and strategically covered his eyes as if he were trying to avoid eye contact.
It was Second Thursday, Spiritual Poetry Night at TCCC, when members and visitors shared their inspirational verses. Once, a young man read a poem laced with sexual innuendoes disguised as a spiritual sonnet. Subsequently, a sign-up sheet with prior approval of any poetry being presented was instituted after Sunday service, so that no unsaved souls could wander in off the streets to sample their “worldly” poetry on the sanctified. It was censorship but the church was not a democracy. I concluded that it was Adam I saw in church the previous Sunday, and I wondered if he had attended just to sign up for poetry night or if he had stayed to hear the Word.
At the table next to where I sat with Maya and Simone, there were four young women who always hung in a pack and whom I had seen only sporadically in church. I had dubbed them “the Sister-Girlfriends.” They were the kind of people who came to church for special functions, musical performances, when there was food, or for the weddings or baptisms of people they knew. I noticed that when men took the mike, the Sister-Girlfriends would make comments behind elaborately manicured hands, or snicker into each other’s ears like high school girls even though they looked to be in their mid-twenties.
I watched as Adam closed his eyes briefly, for effect, or so it seemed; he could have been nervous. Then he spoke, and I realized he was nervous, for his voice belied his demeanor. It was raspy, like someone recovering from laryngitis, shaky, with just the slightest hint of bravado as he intermittently bit his bottom lip.
“This first piece is entitled ‘My Precious Father, Eighty-Three,’” he began.
Despite his earlier self-assurance, I could tell he was a first-timer, a virgin. He made no eye contact, keeping his eyes averted to the back of the darkened church on some distant focal point, much like a pregnant woman in labor would do. He held a battered paperback in his hands, which he kept rolling around and around in a tube shape, but he didn’t read from it; I assumed it was a prop to keep his hands occupied. I tried to make him feel at ease by flashing a small smile at him from the sea of expectant, judgmental faces. But it was evident that we in the audience didn’t exist to him. He was in his own spiritual realm and lost in the anointing of his words. He spoke slowly, deliberately, drawing out each word dramatically but at the same time with a beatnik flair, pausing at every other syllable so that listeners could envision the poem in stanza formation, line by line. As he went on, his voice became more solemn as if he were reciting a prayer.
The poem, cunningly mixed with phrases from various psalms and proverbs, was in the form of an epic; it told of a boy who sought his father’s approval from the time he was little until the father’s death. In the end, the narrator forgave his father for never being around and accepted that the only true father in his life was God. The poem hit home for me and I thought about my own father. As he repeated the phrase, “My precious Father, I love you, for being the only Father of this nation’s fatherless children,” his voice faded away, and I wondered if the poem was autobiographical.
The applause was sporadic until I began clapping with appreciation to get everyone to give him his props; soon others joined in. It wasn’t until Simone nudged me hard that I realized I was the only one left clapping.
It got his attention. He finally looked down from his focal point and gazed into the audience for the first time. Even though he seemed to be glancing in my direction, it seemed he was staring right through me. I gave him an encouraging smile, but he had already returned his sight to his point of origin and was beginning his next poem.
“This next one is called ‘Choose Me, Ninety-Nine.’”
“Yeah,” one of the Sister-Girlfriends muttered.
Another one said boldly and loudly, “I’ll choose you alright.” This was followed by stifled giggles.
“Shhh,” I hushed them, shooting a disapproving look in their direction.
Even after I had turned away from them, I could feel their collective eyes shooting daggers at the back of my head. There were murmurs sweeping the church, and I could see Pastor Allen look apprehensively at the emcee, Sister Erma, perhaps wondering if Adam was about to slip in a risqué poem that hadn’t bee
n approved.
Adam read the second one with more passion, less pauses, much louder, sending even the teenagers into a frenzy and onto their feet. With the extra beats, the poem went over the three-minute limit. There were the usual “Amens” from the older set and affirmative “Uhs” and squeals from the women. The Sister-Girlfriends continued whispering comments and giggling, but none of it seemed to faze Adam. When he was done, the audience gave him a standing ovation, the applause drowning out the Sister-Girlfriends, who finally realized perhaps, that the “me” Adam was referring to was God, and not himself. As hard as I tried to remember the poem in its entirety, the only words that stayed on my mind were, “Choose Me.”
“I’m Adam. Thank you,” he said, his mouth so close to the mike that his voice exploded over the acoustics. As he stepped off the stage, one woman, then another, reached out to shake his hand, complimenting him. Adam strutted past them and almost rushed down the aisle, keeping his head down. I turned to see where he was sitting, but he headed straight for the door. Before I knew it, my feet leaped from under me.
“Where are you going?” Simone and Maya both whispered aghast.
I waved them off and slowed down as I got to the end of the aisle, pretending I was just going out for air. It was another freakish Chicago summer night when the temperature dropped suddenly and drastically, catching everyone unprepared. In the foggy chilly night, I looked up and down the street, but Adam had mysteriously disappeared into the night.
As I turned to go back inside, I heard sounds, like heavy breathing, coming from the area between the church and the school, and I walked cautiously toward the darkened gangway. Recognizing the silhouette of Adam’s hair and the duster, I stopped at a safe distance and waited so as not to embarrass him. I watched as he expelled ragged breaths in the cool night air, his head bent and his hands on his knees for support. I didn’t know if he was having an asthma attack or an anxiety spell. Or perhaps he had lied about being in remission. Maybe he still had cancer.