by James Howe
so he doesn’t qualify as a boyfriend anymore.” “Back in the dark,”
Grandma says with a click of her tongue. “There is so much work
yet to be done.” I’m all set to tell her about the GSA, when she
takes my hands in hers and says, “I am so happy to be here.
I’ve been lonely.”
This is how she is. One minute she’s taking on the world
and the next she’s taking you in her arms. She has been
in our house less than an hour. Hugging her, I can’t say I
tower over her—an inch is only an inch—but for the first
time I don’t feel small. Maybe this is what it means that I’m
growing up. Maybe this is what it means that Grandma
is growing old.
With or Without
Grandma has been here for over a week now, sleeping
in the study that doubles as a guest room. She brought her own
coffeemaker because my parents only drink tea, rescued last
year’s National Public Radio mug from the garlic, claimed it
as her own. Each morning she sits on the sofa (Kennedy
hunched on the arm behind her looking like a gargoyle, but
fuzzy) with her knees drawn up and her favorite mug, steaming,
held in her hands the way I imagine a priest might hold
the sacramental chalice of wine. As far as I know Grandma
is an agnostic, but she calls the mornings her sacred time.
Maybe she worships coffee. There are people who do. Maybe
she worships a god she doesn’t choose to discuss.
On the second day she was here I asked her how long she’d be
staying. “As long as it takes,” she said. “You know I’m getting
the house ready to sell. Didn’t your mother tell you?” My eyes
welled up with tears. “Oh, Addie, come here,” she said. “It’s too
much work to keep up that house all by myself, and it holds too
many memories I’d rather keep in my heart, not face every day in
the cupboard where his cereal bowl still sits or there by the side
of his chair in the pile of papers I stupidly refuse to throw out.”
“But why do you have to move? I love that house,” I said. “I love
it too. But you have to move on. With or without. It’s not as if
you have a choice.”
Today I had my first cup of coffee. I sat down at the other end
of the sofa, tucking up my knees, cupping the mug the way my
grandma cups my face. Johnson jumped down from his perch
behind me, rubbed against my legs, and settled at my feet. I
didn’t speak, I didn’t want to ruin Grandma’s sacred time. I
thought about my grandpa, gone two years now and his papers
still piled by the side of his chair. I looked over at my grandma’s
face. Her eyes were closed. She was smiling. Maybe she was
thinking of him. Maybe she was simply glad that I was there.
Young Man
After they met, Grandma told me, “I like your young man,”
sounding older than she usually does and making me laugh
because, I mean, DuShawn?
Young man?
Not so much.
He did act the part, I guess, asking polite questions
and saying he was sorry to hear her husband had died.
Apparently, I forgot to tell him it was two years ago.
I had this funny moment then, picturing DuShawn and me
together for the rest of our lives and him growing old and
dying the way my grandpa did and what would that be like
and how would I feel.
Lucky is what I felt. Lucky not to be old or sick or lonely.
Lucky to have
a young man
my grandmother likes.
Beautiful
DuShawn is the kind of boy
who always has a rubber band
working its way through his fingers,
who thinks spitballs are an art form,
who makes everything into a joke,
including, sometimes,
himself.
DuShawn is the master of sly looks
and cool moves
and smiles that charm the teachers
and, sometimes,
me.
DuShawn never says anything straight
when he can detour to a wisecrack.
But once when it was dark and we were walking and
I told him I’d heard Becca Wrightsman tell Royal Wilkins
I was plain as dirt, he did not take a detour. He said,
“Don’t believe what girls say about other girls.
You’re beautiful, Addie. They’re just jealous.”
I didn’t say anything then,
and neither did he until
he asked if I wanted a stick of gum.
I said yes, even though I worried
it might be the trick kind
that burns your mouth and
makes you cry.
It wasn’t. It didn’t.
DuShawn, it seems, is more than
one kind of boy.
Here We Go Again
“Listen to this,” I say to DuShawn,
but when he sees I am holding
a book of poems by Langston Hughes,
he says before I can even read him
what I wanted to, “Here you go
again.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
I shoot back, knowing that it means
here we go again, that our voices
will start rising and our palms
will start sweating. Let the fighting
begin.
“Why you got to read that poet?”
DuShawn asks. “Why you always
Maya Angelou’in’ me and askin’ me
did I hear that new song by Bee-
Yon-Say? Why you out-blackin’ the
black guy?”
“And why are you talking like ‘you
from the hood,’ when the only hood
you’ve ever been in is the one
on top of your hoodie? Talking
ghetto doesn’t make you any
blacker.”
“I talk the way I talk, girl,” to which
I say, “I am not your girl. I’ve got a
name.” “Yeah?” says DuShawn.
“I got a name for you too, want to hear
it?” I want to throw the book in his
face,
but I like Langston Hughes too much
for that. “I am going in,” I tell DuShawn,
and he says, “I’m already gone.” He
takes off down the street, leaving me
sitting on my front porch steps alone with
Langston.
I never get to read him the poem.
It isn’t about being black.
It’s about loving a friend who
went away. DuShawn’s friend
Kevin isn’t speaking to him
anymore.
I thought he would like the poem.
I thought it might make him feel
better. Well, he probably would have
just snorted and said, “Me and Kevin
didn’t love each other, girl. That is
so gay.”
Here we go again, throwing words at
each other the way people once threw
garbage out of kitchen windows, never
minding who they might hit in the street
below, the empty, stinking bucket still
theirs.
I Hate Love
Skeezie bops his head to some song
only he hears (there hasn’t been a
jukebox in years), says, “I’m with you
on this one, Addison. L
ove sucks.”
Bobby licks hot fudge from his lower
lip, says you have to work on a
relationship, makes me think he’s
been watching too much TV.
Joe reaches for my hand across
the table, says, “It’s not like you two
are what you’d call stable. You’ve
broken up, like, what? Six times?”
“Only five,” I mutter, thinking about
our latest fight and how I have no
appetite. I tap the table with my spoon.
My ice cream melts. I don’t care.
Hiss and Spit
I’m waiting for Grandma to finish scrubbing the lasagna pan,
my towel at the ready, when one of the cats—Kennedy, I suspect—
hisses loudly in the living room. This is followed by an even
louder hiss, a howl that threatens to become an aria, and
a four-letter word from my dad that he saves for occasions
like this. Grandma laughs and hands me the pan. “Sounds
like your grandpa and me in the early years.” “You fought?”
“Oh, honey, he could hiss and I could spit to put those cats
in there to shame. But over time we changed, mellowed
as most people do. Do you and your young man fight?”
“To put those cats in there to shame,” I answer. Grandma
laughs again. “Well, I’m not saying it’s right, but I’m guessing
it’s only wrong if you bring out the claws. That is something
your grandpa and I never did.” Later, when the cats are curled
into each other on their pillow and Johnson is licking the top
of Kennedy’s head, I see Grandma look up from her book
and nod. “That’s right,” she murmurs. “That’s right.”
What We Don’t Know
KABUL, Afghanistan – Forced marriages involving girls have been part of the social compacts between tribes and families for centuries. Beating, torture, and trafficking of women remain common and are broadly accepted.
—The New York Times
Grandma and I sit reading the New York Times,
dusting the pages with powdered sugar from the
jelly doughnuts we have smuggled into the House of
Healthful Eating. We exchange conspiratorial
winks as Grandma says, “What they don’t know
won’t hurt them.”
My mother is out. My father is, in his words,
puttering. I lick powder from my fingers, turn
a page, reach for my mug of coffee, extra light
with lots of sugar. And then I see the photo
of Nadia with her staring eyes and her bandaged
nose. I tell myself not to read the story, but
of course I do.
In Afghanistan there is a girl named Nadia—
only seventeen, not that much older than me—
who had her nose and an ear cut off while she slept.
Her husband was settling a dispute.
Girls as young as six are forced into marriages,
sold for a few hundred dollars to pay off the debts
of their drug-addicted fathers. And their mothers
have no power to change how it goes. They too
have been beaten and raped, sold and traded like
disposable goods, owned by men, while the only thing
they own is their misery, which some trade for
a bottle of rat poison.
The girls at my school talk about makeup and manicures,
clear skin and straight hair, diets and the perfect
nose. Nadia has had six operations and needs more,
just to have a nose through which she can breathe.
And what do I talk about if not clear skin and straight hair?
I talk about Nadia and about Mariam, married at eleven
to a man thirty years older than she, and beaten
for being unable to bear him a child.
I talk about the poems of Naomi Shihab Nye.
I talk about Sold by Patricia McCormick.
I talk about suffering and how I don’t know
anything about it.
I think I suffer when other girls say cruel things
about me behind my back. I think I suffer when a boy
I like tells me goodbye. I think I suffer when my father
gives me one of his silent looks. But my father
would not sell me for any amount of money. At night
I sleep in a warm bed. In the morning
I sit in a warm kitchen reading the paper,
eating powdered doughnuts.
Nadia says, “I don’t know anything about happiness.”
I go find my father, give him a hug. “What’s up?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Can’t a girl just give her father a hug?”
He kisses the top of my head, says, “You smell like sugar,”
and doesn’t move until I let him.
The Smell of Clove
Does it count as breaking up if the words are never said?
On Monday DuShawn sidles up to me at my locker, goes,
“What’s up, girl?” His fingers working a rubber band, his
jaws chewing gum that smells of clove, the word girl full
of honey.
Maybe we half broke up. Maybe when you half break up,
you don’t have to say anything. There are so many things
I could say, but I like the smell of clove, and there’s his
hand reaching out for mine. “Not much,” I say, taking it,
“what’s up with you?”
I Love
At lunch DuShawn says to me,
“You always punctuate my epiphanies
with pain.”
“Say what?” says
half the table. But I laugh, I get it,
it’s our little joke, a line from
one of our two favorite comic strips—
not Get Fuzzy, the other one,
about the cow and the boy.
DuShawn gives me his crooked smile,
his face breaking out in dimples,
and I know it’s a look that’s meant
for only me, and I feel my insides
flip and my brain flop, and I know
I should know better, but so what,
so what.
I heart love.
Old Friends
Another Saturday night and it goes like this:
Bobby’s dad calling out, “Anybody home?”
My mom calling back, “Door’s open, Mike!”
Bobby poking me, saying hey. We escape
to my room while Mike makes one of his
famous stir-fries and my mom puts her tofu
key lime pie in the fridge to chill.
“Chill,” Mike says to my dad, who’s asking
what he can do to help. Halfway up the stairs
Bobby and I roll our eyes. Parents
can be so embarrassing. Grandma puts out
some cheeses and tells the cats to scat.
Later we all look at old photos Mike found
while cleaning out a drawer. There we are,
Bobby and me, our squishy little faces
almost as red as they are now as we’re forced
to look at ourselves as babies. “Always thought
we’d have more,” Mike says, and my mother
leaves it unspoken that she and my dad had
always planned to have only one.
The grown-ups get to talking, remembering
this time, remembering that. Slowly the house
fills with love, like a balloon with helium, only
it feels like it’s us being filled up, growing light-
headed and silly.
“Life is full of surprises,” Mike says, a catch
in his throat. Grandma nods as the palm o
f her
hand floats down Kennedy’s back. “Indeed
it is,” she says. They are looking at a wedding
picture of Bobby’s parents. Mike asks if he
could have another cup of tea.
Bobby and I have known each other our whole
lives. He’s my oldest friend. One day, if we’re
lucky, we will be old friends, sitting around
with our kids after supper, looking at photos,
remembering ourselves now, saying life
is full of surprises.
Framed Photo
Bobby’s mom was an actress.
I saw her on television once.
Twice, if you count the commercial
for Anthony’s Albany Auto.
The main time was when she had a part
on a show I was too young to watch
but my parents let me stay up to see
“just this once” because it was special.
She played a patient in a hospital, dying
of some Hollywood disease.
She looked pale. Her voice sounded soft
and far away. I remember the way she cried
and said, “How can I leave the children?”
I was impressed that she could cry like that.
That night I had a bad dream and crawled into bed
between my mother and my father.
In the morning I wished I hadn’t watched,
even if it was exciting knowing that Bobby’s mom
was someone almost famous.
A year later she was a real patient
in a real hospital where no one knew
she had once been on TV dying a Hollywood death.
She joked and said, “Too bad I didn’t have cancer
before I got that part. I would have been
so much more believable.”
Bobby and his dad live in a trailer in Shadow Glen.
A framed photo of his mom hangs on a wall.
The photo is glamorous in a way his mother never was,
but Bobby likes it, and so does his dad,
and so do I because I think it’s how
she dreamed herself to sleep at night.