And now she sipped her coffee and took small nibbles from buttered toast iced with Concord-grape jelly. Then she heard a throat clearing, followed by that familiar giggle filled with naïveté that would make Kitt want to rush in and protect, and Kitt looked up and there Verdi stood, groggy, half hung over after another night of stretching her parameters with Johnson, but obviously excited to see Kitt. And Kitt took one look at her, sleep flaking from the corners of her eyes, hastily put-on tam covering her uncombed hair, face naked of lipstick or blush, and saw not just her cousin, but this beautiful woman, all grown up and beaming, as if the heavens had just opened and spilled light all around her as she grinned down at the booth where Kitt sat sporting her new suede jacket.
“Lord have mercy,” Kitt said, shaking her head slowly, letting the toast drop into the saucer as she studied Verdi down to her sockless feet, who right now couldn’t keep her teeth behind her lips, nor stop the reddish tinge from pulsing beneath her brown-over-gold skin. “You’re all messed up in the head.”
“Huh?” Verdi said, unable to contain a stream of giggles.
“In love, girl. Strung out, nose wide open, heart on your sleeve, feet off the ground, head in the sky, infatuated, probably sex-saturated. How else can I say it. You are seriously, dangerously, not-keeping-your-head in love.”
“I am, Kitt.” Verdi squeezed into the booth next to her and banged the table and threw her head back and laughed. “I am, I am, Lord help me because I am. I am. I am. I don’t even know what to do with myself, you know it’s like I’m in a perpetual dreamy state. I wake up, I go to class, I eat, I study, I go to bed at night, and his presence, whether or not he’s with me, you know his presence is with me, prominently, he’s just on my mind and all I really want to do is just be with him.” She took a sip of Kitt’s coffee, a bite from the toast, and spit crumbs out as she talked so fast and excitedly. “He’s so, he’s different, Kitt. Not corny like the boys back home, you know, not all materialistic. He’s got substance, you know he’s into the BSL. Not hardly the type of man Mama would choose for me, or even you.” She stopped then and looked at Kitt, as if prior to now she’d just been talking to the bacon-scented air in this restaurant that felt cozy and safe because it was nearly empty, being before noon on a Saturday and rarely did students start flowing in until one or two. And Kitt’s face was guarded like she’d never seen it before, as if she had to defend her face from some hurt that was threatening to shadow it, and she realized then how she’d been shutting Kitt out, barely returning her calls or dialing her number unprompted to say hello, to ask how her aunt Posie was, to invite herself over for a meal, or even to thank her for the hot plates she’d send down by Posie’s man a couple of times a month. She felt herself getting filled up at the thought of how long it had been since she had unburdened herself to Kitt. Nowhere else had she experienced the type of honesty and trust that she’d known with Kitt and now it was affecting her because she’d been so distracted since she’d been at the university, worse than that even, she’d been stingy, miserly, with her attention when it came to Kitt of all people, the one whose generosity toward the people she cared about had always been amazingly boundless.
“Kitt, Kitt, I really want you to meet him, you know,” Verdi said as she coughed and took another sip of Kitt’s coffee to untighten her throat. “I hope you’ll love him because that’s important to me. And I’m sorry I haven’t called, honest.” She stopped and swallowed and tried not to cry. “It’s just that my time, my focus, I’m—I’m just so scared because I feel like I’m not in control, you know, like is this something I shouldn’t even be doing, and yet I can’t stop myself. I just want him, you know what I mean? I just want to be with him, I’m just so, I’m so wide open and it’s so scary. It is. And on top of everything I miss Mama and Daddy and Aunt Posie, and you, I especially miss you.” Now she was crying. “I didn’t even know how much I’ve missed you until right now.” She covered her face with her hands and then fell into Kitt’s arms.
Kitt just listened and then patted the hiccups that came up in Verdi’s back as she sobbed. She didn’t nudge her away even though Verdi was raining on her new collegiate-looking jacket, the one that she’d hoped would keep her from embarrassing Verdi in front of her Ivy League friends, keep her from showing up looking like her uneducated cousin from the slums. She rubbed circles in Verdi’s back thinking how relieved she was now that she had popped up on Verdi unannounced to see for herself. Now she could concede that Posie had been right. It wasn’t that Verdi had become so enthralled with the university after all, it wasn’t that she no longer felt enamored of Kitt and Posie, it wasn’t that she looked down on them, or was embarrassed by them. She was simply, wildly in love.
“What you do, girl, get drunk last night?” Kitt asked finally as she continued to sweep Verdi’s back in wide circles. “You know that cheap fruity wine you college students drink will make you cry when you should be laughing, laugh when you should be crying. Have you praising the devil and cursing the Lord and trying to figure out which is which between your ass and a hole in the ground.” She felt Verdi strangling against her as her sobbing tried to turn to giggles and then back to sobs. “See what I tell you. You don’t know what to feel, and once you figure that out, you don’t know how to act appropriate to what you feeling.”
Verdi lifted her head and rubbed her eyes. “You’re right, Kitt, I don’t know how to act, but it’s not from wine, it’s from everything being so new, you know living on my own, making my own decisions, I mean there’s so much freedom here, no curfew, you know, the dorm rules such as they are aren’t enforced, I mean it’s a coed dorm as it is and there are, you know, couples who actually live together right in the open. You know, there was some comfort in all the structure Mama put on me; and she’s not here to tell me what to do, what to wear, who my friends should or shouldn’t be, even though I have good friends, one sister, Cheryl from Texas, lives upstairs from me, we’re close, and actually, Barb, the white girl who lives next door to me, is very cool, we’ve actually hung out—” She stopped mid-sentence as she fingered the collar of Kitt’s jacket. “My goodness, Kitt,” she said, her voice going up a full octave, “this is a really nice jacket, I mean really nice, you must have caught some sale because I know you don’t believe in spending money on clothes. And look, I cried all over it,” she whined as she picked up a napkin and dabbed at the wet parts. “And it’s a good suede too, why you let me do that?”
“It’s just a jacket.” Kitt brushed off the compliment, embarrassed now that she’d gone to such an extreme as rushing out to buy a new jacket just to venture down on campus, as if such a gesture had even been necessary with Verdi. She pushed Verdi’s hand away. “Well, don’t go getting all comfortable about being so much on your own,” she said to redirect the conversation. “I talked to Aunt Hortense this morning; she called from the airport; she’s on her way to campus right now. Probably be waiting for you in the lobby when you get back.”
“Huh!” Verdi gasped and shrieked at the same time.
“Gotcha,” Kitt said. Now she threw her head back and laughed. “I wish I had my Polaroid to snap that horrified look that just came up on your face.” She gasped and coughed. The laughter felt good even as it choked her. Meant her chest was opening up. “What? That Negro’s probably laying up in your bed right now, isn’t he?”
Verdi fell heavily against the booth and let out a loud relieved breath. “Damn, Kitt, you ready to give me heart failure. I was thinking I was gonna have to call Barb or Cheryl, tell them to knock on my door—”
“So he is up there, isn’t he? Don’t lie to me, girl, or I’ll tell on you. You know you can’t lie straight anyhow.”
Verdi blushed and hunched her shoulders and looked at Kitt undereyed and then couldn’t contain the smile that took over her face. “Oh-oh, Kitt, why don’t you come up and meet him right now, come on, I really want you to.”
“Girl, please.” Kitt drew the “please” out to three syllables and
took a gulp of coffee. “What are you talking about, you’re talking crazy. Shucks, if I want to see some half-sleep man who’s spent the better part of the night getting his rocks off, all I have to do is go back home and walk in my mama’s bedroom.”
They both laughed and then Verdi got quiet, serious, fingered the fringes on Kitt’s jacket. “You know, I really understand what Aunt Posie was experiencing when I used to spend summers there and she was in one of her enraptured states and floating instead of walking, sighing instead of breathing, just agreeing absentmindedly to everything we wanted.”
Kitt rolled her eyes up in her head, said she sure as hell hoped Verdi wasn’t turning into Posie. “I mean a really great love should come only once or twice in life, maybe three times to a die-hard romantic, but not over and over and over again like it does with Mama.” They both grabbed for the coffee cup at the same time and Kitt told Verdi to go on and finish it since she’d already slobbered and cried in it anyhow. “And order me a fresh cup,” she said as she swirled a crust of toast around in the dish of jelly. “And if you really want me to meet this man that’s got you laughing and crying at the same time,” she said, “go get him. I’ll wait right here. We all three can have a proper get-acquainted breakfast. He can treat.” She saw Verdi’s face dent in and out when she said the part about him treating. She realized then that he couldn’t treat. That Verdi had come all the way from Atlanta on her parents’ good graces and money to one of the most prestigious schools in the country and fallen head over heels in love with a poor boy. Aunt Hortense will just shit over this, she thought as Verdi drained the coffee cup and then jumped up saying that they’d be right back. “But my mama,” Kitt said out loud as she watched Verdi’s back go through the restaurant door. “My poor misdirected, overly hormoned, melodramatic mama will be so very proud.”
Kitt and Johnson did take a liking to each other. As Kitt watched Verdi and Johnson float into her view through the restaurant’s storefront windows, and after she took note to make sure Johnson walked on the outside and protected Verdi from the curb, and then saw them almost saunter through the restaurant door hand in hand, she appreciated Johnson’s scuffed-up leather jacket, his faded sweatshirt where the U emblazoned on the chest had washed out from red to almost brown, and though she could tell that he had the potential to drag one foot behind him and stroll like a jitterbug as he stepped aside to let Verdi walk first through the narrow aisle toward the booth where she sat, his walk right now was straight, tall, respectful with a tenuousness about it like his face was tenuous; his face handsome though in an asymmetrical way, with his long chin made longer by his goatee and mustache and slightly off-centered nose, and his dark eyes that were dashing this way and that, moving through the restaurant, she could tell, looking to find her.
Johnson was struck by Kitt’s pleasing features as well, knew immediately that was her even before Verdi stretched out her arm from Kitt to him and back again as if she were presenting royalty, could tell by the stark resemblance between Verdi and Kitt. Both with those deeply etched cheekbones, and downward-cast eyes, and soft-looking cushions to the lips. Except that Kitt appeared older, stronger than Verdi, especially now as she sat leaned back against the booth, arms folded tightly across her chest, one eyebrow arched way up that gave a half scowl to her face as she looked beyond Verdi to get to him; he guessed she was thinking something like, Let me check this Ivy League Negro out and see what he’s up to with my cousin. He liked that, was glad that Verdi had at least one other person in this town watching her back. Still he figured he’d better pull his best manners from his pocket and wear them like kid leather gloves if he were going to have a shot at maybe causing her to lower her eyebrow and softening that scowl on her face. He knew the importance that Verdi attached to Kitt’s perceptiveness when it came to reading someone’s character, knew how badly Verdi wanted Kitt’s blessings, knew she’d probably pressured Kitt as much she had him to be nice. “Please,” she’d begged on their walk over. “My cousin is the most honest, generous, down-to-earth person I know. You’ll love her, I’m sure of it, so just please be nice.”
Kitt and Johnson didn’t need to be pressured. There really was a natural energy between them as they shook hands and looked each other up and down and confirmed that neither was threatening to the other. Then suddenly, in the same instant it seemed, they both recognized that they’d known each other briefly but significantly in their childhoods.
“Didn’t you go to Hamilton?” they asked simultaneously.
And the anticipation of this first meeting melted into the memory of the powerful slice of history they shared at Hamilton Elementary School. Kitt was in fifth grade, Johnson was in sixth. And a rumor was whipping through the upper grades about Kitt’s mother and Johnson’s father: Johnson’s father had recently left home; packed his bag and told his wife simply that he needed to be free. He took a room over top of Punchy’s Seafood restaurant on Fifty-second Street, and one Friday—so the elementary-school kids said—at 6:30 sharp, Posie slunk into Punchy’s wearing spiked heels and a fake three-quarter-length leopard coat, and sat at the counter and ordered two dozen batter-dipped fried shrimp. Johnson Senior emerged from the darkened staircase that led to his room, and whispered in Posie’s ear loud enough for the waitress to hear—an older sister of a Hamilton sixth-grader—that if she wanted to maybe listen to some Lou Rawls while her shrimp was frying he had a stack of 45s sitting on his spindle upstairs just waiting to fall. And according to the sixth-grader’s waitress sister, the two dozen shrimp got cold waiting for Posie to come down from Johnson Senior’s room even though they’d been double-wrapped in foil and kept next to the flame of the gas-burning stove. And the rumor got so hot, so inflated, that it bounced around the chipped plastered ceilings of the third floor of Hamilton School where the fifth-and sixth-grade classes were. And after a few more Fridays passed they were saying that Posie had taken to coming into Punchy’s earlier, four o’clock, before the rush-hour crowd came with their orders for fried fish. And Johnson Senior was already sitting at the counter waiting for her, had already placed her order, and they’d sprinkle their shrimp with pepper and hot sauce, and feed each other until they were down to nibbling on each other’s hands. And by the time they were done a crowd would have assembled, egging them on in the distinctively loud voices of those who’ve worked hard all week and can finally let loose in a Friday-evening, eagle-flying, scotch-and-soda-and-shrimp kind of way. And according to the sixth-grader’s waitress sister, Posie seemed to glow in the attention, would get more outrageous during their feedings, even licking Johnson Senior’s arms up to the elbow. Until one Friday Posie walked through the door in that three-quarter-length fake leopard only this time the spots didn’t stop with the coat, her legs were also spotted, her hands, even her face. This time, they said, she made purring sounds while she and Johnson Senior fed each other batter-dipped fried shrimp to the cheers and jeers of just-got-paid happy onlookers. And then after she had tasted Johnson Senior’s sweat as much she could, having gone beyond his elbow this time, and growled while she devoured his neck with both teeth and tongue, this time, the sixth-grader swore that her waitress sister swore that Posie unbuttoned the three-quarter-length fake leopard, and was butt naked underneath, except that it was hard to tell at first because leopard spots that matched the coat had been painted over her entire body. But when Punchy’s other men patrons realized the nature of the cat woman before them, they told Johnson that if he didn’t go for it, they surely would. And a few even started coming out of their jackets and even shirts until Johnson Senior beat them to it, and according to the waitress, who swore to her sixth-grade sister on a stack of Bibles, Posie and Johnson Senior did it right there in the middle of Punchy’s Seafood floor. The rumor became like air at Hamilton Elementary; it was everywhere, just inhaled by the older students who understood what a nasty thing had happened between Johnson’s father and Kitt’s mother. When either Johnson or Kitt walked by a group of assembled classmates they wer
e met with “meows” and purrs, and scratching sounds, because these children were avid Batman fans and had studied well the sounds that Cat Woman made. Then one day Johnson saw Kitt on the landing in the back stairwell that was reserved for fire drills but Johnson had started using it to avoid the throngs of teasers who crowded up and down the main staircase. Kitt was moving quickly down the stairs and she looked so strong and lonely from the back and he had to take the steps three at a time to catch her. “Hey, hey, Kitt,” he’d called, but she kept her swift descent going. “I want you to know that my father’s allergic to shellfish, so they’re lying, or my father would be dead right now.” She’d stopped then, turned and looked up at him; they looked at each other with a straight-on directness that was unusual for children their age.
“And my mother doesn’t own a leopard coat, fake, three-quarter-length, or otherwise,” she said. And they both just stood there, silence reverberating between them, chests heaving, tears welling up. They both knew it to be a fact that their parents had taken up with each other, not at Punchy’s over batter-dipped fried fish, but Kitt had walked in on Johnson Senior and her mother holding hands in the living room of their second-floor apartment; Johnson had seen Posie leaving Punchy’s through the side door that led up to his father’s rented room. And even though Posie and Johnson Senior broke it off after less than a couple of months anyhow, and the rumor dissipated and dissolved into the next salacious story to titillate hyperactive prepubescent fifth-and sixth-graders, and even though Johnson and Kitt never really interacted after that afternoon, they had connected in that darkened stairwell in a way that their youth would not permit them to understand. It was a connection that resurfaced now as they marveled at the uncanniness that they should have Verdi in common.
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