That damn scarf was inappropriate then because of the occasion, it was inappropriate now because of the season.
“Mrs. Fulton … Mrs. Fulton!” I yelled her name so loud that even the mangy dogs that sniffed the garbage on the corner took notice.
“Uh, yes?” Mrs. Fulton turned to face me. It had been nearly two years since I’d seen her, and except for the extra weight and the gray hair, she still looked the same. The same thin lips and bulging eyes. The same lingering scent of Jean Naté talcum powder and cocoa butter lotion. Funny how some things never change.
We eyed each other for a long time, she pretending not to know who I was, me wondering how long she would want to play the game before I called her out and embarrassed her right there on Euclid Avenue.
“Oh, um, you Delia’s girl, right?” she finally said, squinting her eyes at me. Her shoulders were hitched up in a tense pose and she clasped her hands tightly in front of her. Her eyes looked everywhere but at me. She was thinking about the last time we were face-to-face. Or maybe she was thinking about the time before that. The incident that brought us together and then tore us apart.
All the while I watched her green polka-dot scarf and restrained myself from snatching it from her neck.
“That’s right, do I look so different?” I asked and wiped at my face as if I could wipe away the mask that suddenly made me a stranger in her eyes.
“Um, no, not really. Well, a little thinner, I guess, but still the same really.” Mrs. Fulton turned and looked over her shoulder, hoping to see someone she knew passing by. Someone to save her from me—but only strangers looked back at her.
We stood there for a long time, no idle chitchat passing between us, just the wind and the chill of what had been lost. I stretched a bit and she yawned daintily into her hand, before pulling at that damn spring scarf and peering down at her shoes.
I wanted to ask how Devon was doing. Was he in college? Maybe going pro after graduation? What had Devon accomplished? I wondered.
“Well …” I said instead.
“Well,” she repeated and scratched at the back of her ear. “It was nice seeing you again. Say hello to your mom and dad for me,” she said and tugged again at the scarf.
“Yeah, okay, I’ll do that,” I responded and just stood there watching her hurry away from me, the thin end of the scarf flapping hopelessly behind her.
I started not to mention it to Delia but it spilled out of my mouth when I opened it up to shove a forkful of spaghetti into it.
“I saw Mrs. Fulton today.”
Delia had already eaten and so she was sprawled out on the sofa watching a rerun of The Cosby Show. Her head spun around so quickly that I thought it would rock and tumble from her neck like a broken toy.
“What—?” She picked up the remote and lowered the television volume. “What did you say?” Her voice was filled with astonishment.
“I saw Mrs. Fulton today,” I repeated casually.
“Umph,” Delia sounded and turned to face the television again. She increased the volume until someone from the next-door apartment banged on the wall and yelled for her to turn it down.
“Mom.” Her name was like a prayer on my lips. She turned to face me and I fully expected her eyes to be filled with tears, but they were dry as a bone.
Our eyes held each other for a long time and I realized that every day Delia looked older around her eyes and mouth.
“What she say?” Delia asked, and the eager look on her face told me that she wanted, like I did, to hear that Janice Fulton’s son Devon was mangled, paralyzed, or dead. Delia sat up and leaned forward expectantly.
“She asked about you and … him.”
Him was Hy-Lo; his name became vinegar in my mouth and so I found it hard to say.
“What—” she began and then stopped to draw on the stagnant hot air of the apartment. “What she say about her Devon?”
“Nothing,” I replied and dropped my eyes. “I didn’t ask,” I said to my knees. I could hear Delia sigh and then ease herself back down into the worn sofa.
I punished my mouth for mentioning the incident. I bit my lips until they bled and then I hurt my tongue by licking the bruised blood away.
Delia turned the volume back up on the television once she knew there was nothing left for her to listen for. “Oh,” she mumbled and reached for her pack of cigarettes.
I had failed her. I wasn’t even able to bring home a bit of news that might have made her life better, or at least her day. I watched her for a long time before I decided that I could come up with nothing that would make it okay for her. Two years, and I couldn’t come up with anything that would make it okay.
I moved down the hall toward my room and stopped, as I always did, to straighten the framed photograph of Malcolm. He was smiling at me with his crooked front teeth and dressed in a bright green polyester shirt that was unbuttoned enough to show the dark brown of his chest and the three hairs that grew there like the first green blades of spring grass. He thought he was so cool and so did the girls who chased behind him.
I smiled to myself and ran my thumb across the glass, leaving a wide clean streak through the powder-fine dust. I missed him.
Chapter Ten
It was 1979. I was thirteen years old and rap music had a foothold on the black youth of America. We all dreamed of spinning records behind the Sugar Hill Gang and Kurtis Blow.
But my musical taste stretched far beyond the rhyming rhythms that filled the airwaves and pounded hard out of the boom boxes that sat under park benches or rested on corners while young men spun their bodies at breakneck speeds on their heads or elbows like tops on large pieces of cardboard for change and applause.
Me, I spent hours in front of the mirror singing along with Natalie Cole, Aretha Franklin, and Love Unlimited. The bottoms from my pajamas were on my head, the legs hanging down my back. Flannel hair. In my mind I had long silky tresses and I swung them back and forth to the music. My microphone was a comb or brush and my audience the cosmetics that lined my dresser top.
I was happy in my musical world where I was the star and everybody loved me. In concert I was free to shake and shimmy my body all over the stage, stopping to blow a kiss or catch a long-stemmed rose.
My fans adored me and begged me for more and I gave it to them over and over again until I was breathless or until my mother screamed for me to turn it off. I hated for the music to stop because when it did the apartment would become too quiet. I could hear the roaches moving in between the walls and the soft padding feet of the people who lived above us. I could hear the screaming cry of a police siren ten blocks away and the twisting snap of the cap on the short neck of Delia’s vodka bottle.
She had them hidden around the apartment, in the box of Christmas ornaments that sat at the back of Hy-Lo’s closet and in the corner of her closet behind the three pairs of wornout shoes she owned. The ones she had the shoemaker dye over and over to fit with the seasons. The ones that needed new lifts and soles every three months or so. She had them hidden in the pocket of the patchwork leather coat she had been so proud of in the ’70s, the one with the fake fur collar and the bell sleeves. The one she couldn’t bear to part with even though Hy-Lo had flown into a rage in ’78 and sliced it with a straight razor clean down the middle.
I had two to contend with now. Both of my parents lived life from the bottom of a bottle. I hated Hy-Lo even more because I knew he had driven her to it.
I watched Delia withdraw from Malcolm and me. She spent most of her time curled up in bed, too drunk to cook, clean, or talk. I became the caregiver, bed-maker, homework checker, and TV dinner heater-upper. Many a night I shoved the tiny foil-wrapped dinners into the hot oven and thought about shoving my head in right beside them.
Hy-Lo came home one Saturday morning and the sink was full of dishes, there was dust gray and thick covering his stereo and the top of the floor-model television. The bathroom sink was littered with toothpaste droppings, the mirror above it was sm
eared and speckled, and the white ceramic floor was blotchy with dirt.
He walked from room to room taking in the untidiness that surrounded him. He said nothing but the anger was building behind his eyes. Delia was sitting on the edge of her bed staring blankly at the small black-and-white television. Her hair was a bird’s nest and her blue flannel robe was buttoned wrong. She had risen with the sun and had had two screwdrivers before the garbage trucks came to haul the refuse away.
Hy-Lo looked at her but said nothing. He walked to the kitchen and for a long time there was no noise, just the sound of my breath and the beating of my heart, and then I heard it, the twisting snap of the cap that was to begin the day.
I was thirteen and had been hit by Hy-Lo too many times to count. But he had hit me as a father would hit his child. The blows were hard, but did not carry the full force of his strength. I did not know this was the case until that day, when something in the back of my mind snapped and my small fists found themselves pounding mercilessly on his back.
He had been in the kitchen for more than an hour. My bladder was full but I did not want to move from my bed and walk across the floor to the bathroom to relieve myself. The flushing of the toilet would disturb the peace of the apartment and most likely become the starting bell for the fight to begin. So I pushed my hands between my legs and forced it back up inside me, even though my kidneys ached.
The sunlight crept around the loose corners of the window shades and partially filled the room with its morning rays. Malcolm snored softly from the lower bunk, and the sound of Julia Child’s voice seeped through the wall like one of her thick creamy sauces. Delia coughed. Maybe she inhaled too deeply on her Newport or maybe her saliva slipped down the wrong pipe. Whatever it was, it caused a thin stream of urine to break free and saturate my hands and dampen the sheet below me. I cussed beneath my breath, but I can’t remember if it was because of my wet panties or the sound of Hy-Lo walking across the floor.
“Delia.” He spoke low in that tone that assured you you were going to get a whipping.
She didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t even turn her head from the television to look at him.
“Delia,” he said again, his voice a bit heavier, the annoyance in his words thicker, more dangerous. “This house is a mess. Get up and clean up. Now.”
The “now” is what brought the floodwaters down. My mattress was soaked through; the smell was ripe almost immediately and then came the sound of the slap that threw my mother off the bed and onto the floor.
I don’t remember jumping from the bed or even running into my parents’ room. Although I can recall quite clearly my father standing over Delia, his arm drawn back, his fist a ball of steel flesh poised in midair ready to descend upon my mother’s high cheekbones and Cherokee-African nose.
He struck her and left her curled into a ball beside the radiator. There was blood on the radiator from where her head had hit the metal. And there was blood dripping from her forehead as she whimpered. She looked up at him expectantly. No, actually wanting.
Maybe he saw that look too. Maybe it scared him. Or maybe it was the blood; but I think it was her eyes and the fearlessness that bloomed in them.
I jumped on his back and felt the heat of his body between my wet thighs. I beat at his head and shoulders until he spun around hard enough to shake me free. But I was on him again, like a wildcat gone mad. I beat at his back and kicked at his shins. And then he did it. He hit me like a man hits another man in the boxing ring. He hit me like a man hits another man in the street when they’re done with words and only fists will do. He hit me like he hit Delia, and the blow took my breath away and sent me flying into the dresser. There was a crack and then the air became thin, the room swam around me and went black.
I had seen Hy-Lo’s face look tired, mischievous, mean, and angry. I had never seen fear. As we waited in the emergency room of Kings County Hospital I watched as fear marched back and forth across his face just as many times as he crossed the cream-colored marble floors of the room.
Hy-Lo’s eyes were wide and his tone became increasingly humble with every trip he took to the registration window. “Um, how much longer, ma’am?” I heard him say.
“Ma’am” echoed in my ears and even pulled a smile from deep inside me. How much did it take for Hy-Lo to call someone ma’am? Evidently a broken rib inside the body of his only daughter.
My head was resting in Delia’s lap; my legs stretched out on the brown chairs of the waiting room. Her hand stroked my forehead nervously. It did not soothe me, but I knew she found comfort in doing it. Every now and then she would bend her head down and look into my face. “Soon,” she would say, and her breath, stinking of Newports and vodka, wafted over me.
My sleep was periodically interrupted by my mother’s words and the low hum that came from the sick people around me. Someone would moan, cough, or sneeze and then the moan would come again. I thought Delia should be moaning. Moaning for the gash in her forehead and the pain in her life. But she had found places to put those hurts; they were stored in tiny nip bottles in dark corners and holiday boxes in our apartment.
Before we had left the apartment, as I lay semiconscious on the floor of her bedroom, Delia had taken a moment to fix herself up as best she could. She tried hard to hide the violence that was in her life by ripping up an old dustrag and wrapping it tight around her head. A large dark spot, so red it was nearly black, filled the gray whiteness of the cloth almost immediately. Delia put on a camel-colored tam and pulled it down low over the makeshift bandage, and to complete the disguise she put on her Jackie Onassis shades, the ones she wore when her eyes were swollen. She wore those a lot.
“Lowe. Kenzie Lowe!” The doctor came out with his clipboard in hand and called my name.
“She’s right here,” Hy-Lo answered for me.
Delia shifted and gently lifted my head from her lap. “Take your time, baby,” she said as I slowly turned my body and brought my feet to rest on the floor.
“Ow … ow … ow,” I cried out as the pain shot up my side and my stomach flip-flopped inside me.
“Okay, okay,” Delia said and swallowed hard. I stood up and took a step, but the pain brought me down to my knees.
“Nurse!” the doctor yelled out. His voice did not carry concern but annoyance. “Nurse!” he yelled again and scratched the bald space on top of his head. “Get this girl a wheelchair.”
A woman in white appeared beside me. “Excuse me,” she said, stepping around my mother and grabbing me under my arms.
I screamed out as she settled my body into the worn leather of the chair. Hy-Lo rushed to me; the fear was working overtime on his face, his bottom lip hung nearly down to his chin, and his eyes were open wide, blinking back the artificial brightness of the fluorescent light above our heads.
“You remember what I told you?” His whisper was a tremor of words and I knew the fear had hold of his vocal chords too. I didn’t drop my eyes in an obedient gesture or nod my head in agreement. Instead I held his eyes with mine until the nurse wheeled me into the examining room. I was in control now; his fate rested in the hairline fracture of my rib and the soft tissue of my tongue.
The doctor probed and prodded me and then sent me for X-rays. In between Dr. Katz asked questions, questions that made my mother bite at her already ragged fingernails. “So—” The doctor looked at his clipboard, flipped through two sheets of paper, and then said my name. He said it slowly with the uncertainty of a man from the Midwest unused to names with African origins. “Kenzie, how did you manage to hurt yourself?” There was no suspicion in his voice. His question was a required one as stated by the Board of Certified Physicians. He probably asked the same question over a hundred times during that shift alone.
I shot a look at Delia. I caught the spite that flickered in her eyes. She couldn’t take a stand. Not yet anyway. The right response would be her first step forward and away from Hy-Lo. She held her breath and waited for me to answer. Waited for me to
help her climb out. Her eyes urged me to tell the truth.
“I, uh …” I began, the words climbing up the inside of my throat. Tired words that once out would allow me to be a child again. They moved too slowly and stopped often to rest. I blinked at the white curtain that surrounded and separated me from the moans, coughs, and sneezes of the others. My back was to Hy-Lo and I heard him shift behind me. Perhaps he was adjusting his jacket or just scratching the short hairs that had popped up on his chin during the few hours we had been there. But I knew his movement was a warning, a reminder of the lie he wanted me to tell.
“When they ask you what happened, you tell them you slipped in the bathroom. The floor was wet. You tell them that!” he yelled out above my screams of pain as I lay across the backseat of his green Oldsmobile.
“I slipped on the wet floor in the bathroom.” I said it, I told the lie he had made up for me and the tired truth rolled back down my throat. Delia almost crumbled and the dim light in her eyes went out.
The doctor nodded his head and wrote something down. “I got two kids and …” he started to say, but the rest of his words escaped me, lost in the the folds of the curtain that surrounded us.
Things were quiet in the apartment for days after my accident. There was no bickering, fighting, or the sounds of a bottle being opened, none except soda bottles and the grape juice I loved. That afternoon after we came home from the hospital and picked Malcolm up from Grandma Gwenyth’s place, I lay in my bed, my ear pressed to the wall listening to Hy-Lo promise Delia he would never drink again. He said “sorry” more times than I care to remember. And then I cringed because I thought I heard a whimper and it was not the one I was familiar with; it was not Delia’s.
Hy-Lo was lying, of course. This was his way of redeeming himself and gaining forgiveness from Delia. He hadn’t forgotten the look in her eyes from that night.
Delia did not accept his apology; but the fact that she did not hustle Malcolm and me out of the apartment and straight to the warm comfort of Mable’s home must have told Hy-Lo she had forgiven him. He threw in his promise for good measure like the cement around the base of a flagpole. Just in case.
The Warmest December Page 11