“You’re Johnson’s son,” Kitt said with certainty.
“You’re Posie’s daughter.” Johnson matched her confident-she-was-right tone with his own brand of voice pulled up from his stomach.
They laughed then, slapped hands. Hugged. Pointed at each other and laughed some more. And when Verdi bounced up and down because she couldn’t contain her excitement over Kitt and Johnson finally meeting, and asked, “What? What is it?” Kitt and Johnson both paused, as if they both sensed how easily they could slip into a fractious, contentious vein even growing to hate each other forced to compete bitterly for Verdi’s affections if they didn’t have some other point of alliance between them that had nothing to do with Verdi. They read in each other’s eyes at that moment the need to keep their original bonding scenario unspoken, and in so doing undiluted.
“It’s nothing,” Kitt said as she squeezed Johnson’s hand and laughed some more.
“Well, how do you know each other’s parents?” Verdi asked, looking from Kitt to Johnson, amusement and confusion competing for expression on her face.
“Just that your aunt Posie was the, um, pretzel lady at our school,” Johnson said.
“And your, um, boyfriend? Is that appropriate college lingo? Anyhow his father bought a lot of pretzels.”
Johnson chuckled and winked at Kitt and kissed Verdi on the lips. And Verdi decided that it didn’t matter, that all that mattered right now was that two of the people she cared most about were seeming to be beyond the uncomfortably stiff formality that could kill a friendship even while it was budding.
“Well, let me tell you”—Kitt rushed her words—“Johnson here had one hell of a funny-shaped head back in elementary school.”
“And I mean no disrespect,” Johnson said then, “but your cousin was kind of, you know, fat.”
Kitt punched Johnson’s arm as if they’d been close for years and they all three laughed and spread themselves out in the back booth and sealed their closeness over omelettes and grits and mounds of breakfast meats.
And Kitt liked Johnson so much that she insisted on paying for breakfast that morning, told them to just pretend that the breakfast took place at her kitchen table which she’d been planning to do anyhow if she could get an occasional callback from Verdi. Framing her paying in those terms made it acceptable. Saved Johnson the embarrassment of having to spend money no doubt slipped to him by Verdi; Kitt had been on those kinds of dates before when the man was nice as Cooter Brown and twice as broke, and she’d want to at least split the bill but their maleness took it as a personal affront that the woman should pay and she’d sit there and watch them squirm and even pull up nickels from the lining of their pants to piece together enough to cover the tab.
But Johnson seemed not to mind that Kitt was paying, seemed not to mind most things Kitt suggested, even when she’d call and tell Verdi to send Johnson up to her house when he got some time, that Posie’s limo driver had bowed out on her, “surprise, surprise,” she’d say jokingly, and this new man of Posie’s was blind in one eye and couldn’t drive and she’d cooked way too much of this or that and could they help take some of it off of her hands. Johnson was glad to go. And he’d feel a calming need to open up descend as he and Kitt always started off talking about elementary school while Kitt spooned out the plates and double-wrapped them in wax paper and carefully taped the sides. And before long the topics would turn to things more contemporary, sometimes Posie would even be in the kitchen, would join in with her odd mix of wit, wisdom, and immaturity that tickled Johnson so. It wasn’t uncommon for them to chatter for an entire hour after the bags of food were packed. And sometimes Johnson would stop by there even if there was no offer of food as an enticement, if he’d just been to see his mother and needed to thin out his sadness before he went back to campus. And Posie and Kitt welcomed him with laughs and hugs and made much over his arrival as if Johnson was becoming the son Posie should have had, the brother Kitt needed.
Kitt and Johnson were spawning such a pure honesty between them and they’d find themselves telling each other things that heretofore had remained caged and locked in their own minds. Johnson and his feelings of inferiority when it came to being able to treat Verdi in the first-class kind of way she’d grown up with. Kitt and her regret that she’d never had a shot at college, at least that’s what the guidance counselors told her when they placed her in the home-economics track. Johnson and the call he sometimes got for the street, that as much as he had an aversion for the type of lifestyle that brought his brother down, he was still drawn at least to some of the people who’d been friends with his dead brother; he was so fascinated by their honor-among-thieves credo. Kitt and her fear that she’d never fall head over heels the way Verdi had with him, the way Posie did every other month; she loved her mother dearly, she told him, but was so afraid of becoming like Posie that she’d hold back even with decent prospects; always she’d hold back.
And sometimes after they’d talked so long until they were drained in a satisfied kind of way and Johnson would linger over a Kool filter tip, they’d pick up each other’s eyes through the smoke, and something that would approach a physical attraction would try to taint the air between them and make it go common and low. They knew to disregard it, to not even dignify it by heightening it to a stature that would make it worth considering. They both loved Verdi too much to let the bad air form itself into a thought to be pondered, the commission of a low-down act to be considered. And as they were beginning to realize, they loved each other too in a way that was so honest and so pure that they’d never risk toppling it because some nefarious stream of chemistry decided to show itself in the smoke of a Kool filter-tip cigarette.
But even with all of his self-disclosures, Johnson still kept to himself the taste of thunder, that manifestation of the storm cloud that would start in his stomach and rise up into his chest like reflux from a too-spicy meal until the hot embers regurgitated and singed the skin along his jaw. It was especially strong during the three-and-a-half-week Christmas break and Verdi had gone home, even though she’d begged her parents to let her stay on campus and had almost had her father ready to relent until Hortense grabbed the phone, voice cracking, insisting that she needed her baby home, that she’d get physically ill if she had to endure the holidays without her, that it was enough that they’d allowed her Thanksgiving with Kitt, but she’d rather she just pounce on her heart than deny her Christmas with her only child. And it was a teary good-bye when Johnson loaded Verdi into the cab headed to the airport that Christmas Eve, and his dorm felt like a mausoleum with Tower and Moose and everybody else he might interact with gone home too. And he felt like the right thing to do was to go home and spend Christmas Eve with his mother, not that he wanted to, but that was certainly the right thing to do. And he put a sweater on under his scuffed-up leather jacket and decided to walk. Had walked past the empty frat houses and the closing-early hoagie and steak shops that serviced the campus, and the off-campus apartment buildings with their iron-gated windows, and the Acme and the Presbyterian church, and then the blurring that happened between the campus and the neighborhood where the structures looked the same but the people scurrying in and out were now worlds apart, one being trained to take over the world—or at least to take it on; the other, well, to the other this small patch of the city was the world. And he felt so wide-legged at this point on his trek up, straddling the worlds, when he was fully on campus he was sure West Philly was where he belonged, and when he was at home, he was sure his rightful place was on campus, but right around this spot where the boundaries overlapped he was at home nowhere. He hurried across the imaginary divide and now had another mile to go and the sun was beginning to drop and the air out here was growing teeth and he pulled his skull cap farther down over his ’fro to at least meet his ears, and he wasn’t wearing gloves, he didn’t own gloves. And now he was right in front of the three-story house where Bug lived, his dead brother’s best friend, and he thought what the hell, he
’d extend holiday greetings and in the process thaw his hands.
Bug’s real name was Anthony and when he was small everybody called him Ant for short but as he got older, bigger and tougher and delinquent, and learned how to fight with banister posts, he changed his nickname to Bug because he thought Ant sounded girlish and threatened to kick ass if anybody called him that again. Bug and Johnson’s brother Fred had been best friends from kindergarten. They were supposed to go to Vietnam together under the inducement of enlisting under the buddy system that assured they’d be platoon mates, but Bug failed the physical, was diagnosed with hepatitis, and they wouldn’t let Fred unenlist.
Bug repeated that story to Johnson now as he ushered him into his dimly lit third-floor apartment and hugged him and clenched his teeth in the middle of telling Johnson how much he looked like Fred standing there. “That should have been me in that chopper with him, you know that don’t you, Johnson. We was bloods, man, seriously, man.”
And Johnson nodded and was not as adept as Bug at holding back the tears and asked to use his john. When he’d gotten himself sufficiently together he walked back into the living room via the kitchen where the table was loaded down with a balance beam scale and plastic Baggies and a shoe box filled with weed. He got a flashback then of the first time he’d smoked a joint sitting on a crate in the empty lot around the corner from his house. It was the summer between tenth and eleventh grade and it was Bug who’d turned him on, taught him how to roll it, how to hold it in until he coughed. And then Fred came up on him, knocked him in the head so hard the joint flew out of his mouth, told him to take his ass home, told Bug, “He’s going to college, man, he don’t need to be doing that shit.”
Bug and Johnson were on the same wavelength because he repeated that story to Johnson as he offered him a seat on his orange vinyl couch under the Lava light–enhanced Jimi Hendrix poster. He was bursting in fact with stories about Fred that had Johnson in stitches and then tears as he and Bug passed a continuous stream of joints between them. And Johnson was so caught up he lost track of time as Bug introduced him to dimensions about his brother that he’d never known. For this space of time that he sat on Bug’s orange vinyl couch and smoked joints and laughed through Bug’s vivid recollections about all the hell they raised, his brother wasn’t really dead. And especially when he wasn’t laughing, when Bug’s stories turned searing in their revelations about his brother’s true nature, it was as if his brother was sitting right next to him on the couch, telling him to move the fuck over, that real men didn’t sit so their bodies touched even as he had his arm around Johnson’s shoulder. He was enraptured by the time Bug told the story of how he and Fred were caught shoplifting model airplane kits from the five-and-ten when they were in their early teens, “only caught our asses because your softhearted brother stopped in the middle of our getaway to chase down some common thief who’d just snatched some old lady’s purse. ‘Why? Why you do such a foolish-assed thing?’ I asked him all night that long night we spent in the Youth Study Center. And you know what he said, told me he had principles, that he was just liberating that model airplane, that everybody paid for that stolen airplane and what’s twenty-nine cents split a million ways, but if that woman would have lost her purse that probably held her expense money for the month, only she would have paid, and that ain’t right, ain’t fair worth a damn. You know he turned it into a political act. That’s what I loved about your brother, he had a heavy understanding. You dig where I’m coming from, Johnson?”
Johnson did, even appreciated his brother’s ambivalence when Bug related how his brother had dabbled in the Black Panther Party, but knew he’d have to commit with his life and wasn’t sure if he was willing to give his life for it. “Aint that a shit,” Bug said, choking on sobs. “He still ended up giving his life, just that the movement he gave it for wasn’t even his own.”
Johnson got up to leave then, asked Bug how he planned on spending Christmas.
“I’m hanging around and dealing a little weight, man. Christmas is so much bullshit but it’s good for business, especially with all you college students converging again on the neighborhood. That pound I got on the table be gone by this time tomorrow night, man. So I’m just hanging and selling. Stop on through if you of the mind to over the holiday. Or anytime, man. You my young blood. Anytime.”
And Johnson knew he would stop back again. Thought that Bug might even step in and fill the oversized shoes his brother wore. Especially after he got home and his mother had already gone to bed, a card for Johnson propped up against her tabletop Christmas tree, the tree leaning, all the heaviest bulbs on one side. He tenderly rearranged the bulbs to balance them. The bulbs were thin-skinned and fragile in his weather-worn hands and he took his time. When he finished he sat down in the plastic-covered armchair facing the tree. Plugged the tree in and watched the lights blink on and off. The bulbs reflected a near-perfect symmetry. He thought about Verdi. Cried.
Five
Already Verdi could feel the levity inside of her that happened whenever she approached Kitt’s house. Even though the fine drizzle was keeping the air more gray than yellow today, the clouds seemed not even to be as heavy when she turned onto Sansom Street. Partly because this block was such a diamond even in the 1990s, thanks to Kitt’s tenaciousness, her political activism. Though portions of West Philly had slid in property value like skis down an icy slope, there were no abandoned houses on Kitt’s block, no litter or graffiti, no peeling paint, no hedges out of control, no drug corners or Stop ’n’ Cop Beer Marts within a two-block radius, and the empty lot on the corner had been transformed into a vivacious urban garden that made Kitt’s house such a joy to approach.
Not that Verdi was unhappy when she approached the house she shared with Rowe; she filled her space nicely with Rowe; was happy the way air inside of a voluminous crate is happy, protected, right angle to right angle. Not buoyant though. At Kitt’s she was buoyant. Especially now as she started up the steps to Kitt’s house, and here was her slice of sunshine, Sage, jumping up and down and clapping when she saw Verdi and squealing and trying to say her name, gasping as spit dripped down her chin as she blew out the V sound, forcing it out, trying to make the whole name come out with the “Ve.” But the whole name wouldn’t come out, and Sage stomped her feet in frustration.
“That’s okay, Sage,” Verdi soothed as Sage bounded onto the enclosed porch, her arms wide open, and Verdi dropped her briefcase and scooped Sage up and squeezed her as if it had been weeks since she’d seen her. Though it had just been hours, just since 2:45 when she’d escorted Sage’s class to the waiting school bus, the way she escorted all of her students at the end of the day, and greeted them all first thing in the morning. Had been criticized for being too hands-on as a principal by the vocal few who resented Verdi hurtling over the vice principal already in place to get the principal’s slot, had been told to her face that she was interrupting the emotional attatchment that the children needed to have not for her but for their teachers. Wanted to do like Kitt would have done, wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but she was a consummate professional, told them it would take her time to retrain herself, after all this was only her first year out of the classroom and the tug to spend time with the children was stronger than her managerial inclinations.
“How’s my sugar lump?” Verdi said as she kissed Sage’s cheek with an exaggerated slurping sound and then eased her back down on the porch. She stooped to Sage’s eye level; what a perfect face this child had with that same grin as the cousins and the twins that involved her entire face and enchanted people so and shocked them too when they realized that Sage was different, special, that she hadn’t yet spoken her first word though she was seven, but even still she had surpassed all predictions of severe developmental delays, could point to her eyes and ears, and nose; if her mother said go upstairs and look in my top drawer and bring down my pink eyeglass case, she could do that too. Though she couldn’t yet read and write, and had a tenden
cy to keep her fists balled, and sometimes reacted emotionally to strangers, she remained a puzzle to the medical community by how dramatically she’d surpassed their predictions, and yet she couldn’t talk.
Verdi put Sage’s hand against her jaw so that Sage could feel her muscles working. “Sugar,” she said, drawing the word out. “Sugar.”
“Verdi,” her aunt Posie said with the same exaggeration and then a laugh as she walked out onto the enclosed porch.
Verdi giggled and ran to Posie the way Sage had just greeted her. She mashed her lips against Posie’s cheek that smelled of Ponds cold cream and reminded Verdi of the chunks of her growing-up she’d spent with Posie and Kitt where she’d felt a sanctity she’d known in few other places.
Posie squeezed Verdi to her, felt the sharpness of her shoulder blades even through the taupe-colored trench coat. Stretched her back to arm’s length. “I hope you’re trying to hold on to what little weight you’re carrying, darling. Looks like you shed a few pounds in the couple of days since I last saw you. I mean you look good, don’t get Aunt Posie wrong, that brown highlights to that pixie haircut, I personally like you with a little more hair but you wearing that short style well now, looking good baby, like a piece of raspberry cheesecake, you do, sweet and well adorned, just sliced a bit too thin.”
“Oh Auntie, I know, I know, but everybody can’t be the stacked figure eight like you and Kitt,” Verdi said as she kissed Posie’s cheek again.
“True,” Posie said, and did a little twirl and a curtsy followed by Sage imitating her grandmother and they all three laughed. Though Kitt fussed often about her mother’s inability to age, to accept that she was no longer a twenty-year-old temptress, Verdi loved this about her aunt, was awestruck by how alluring Posie still was even at sixty.
“Kitt’s with her last client of the day and I’m sure not gonna be the one to go back there and tell her you’re here, so you might as well come on in and get comfortable, darling, and what may we thank as the reason for being graced with your presence two evenings in one week?” Posie said as she opened the door and held it and waited while Sage ran back to try to scoop up Verdi’s briefcase.
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