Mama
On the morning Horus left for New York, Brenda pretended to be asleep. Earlier that week, he told her he was going to meet his brother, Manden. And as Brenda lay in the bed listening to Horus go out the front door, she tried to convince herself that he told her the truth, even though deep inside, she knew that there was something else. Something was wrong. She had noticed changes in him that she kept sweeping to the back of her mind—his irregular sleeping, his obsessions with things being locked, his tendency to eat large plates of food or nothing at all. In bed, he reached for her with a desperation she hadn’t felt from him before. Days before that morning he left for New York, their conversations had become exchanges of minutiae: what they might have for dinner, whether or not there were any more clean undershirts, when the Blockbuster movies needed to be returned. Sometimes she would wake in the night and discover that he was downstairs in the kitchen. When she asked him what he was doing, he gave the strangest responses.
“Brenda?”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever gotten something back that you thought was gone forever?”
“Like what?”
“Just gone.”
“Like a lost ring?”
“No, a person.”
“What do you mean, Horus?”
“Nothing, baby.”
He became more and more quiet, and there were days when they hardly talked at all. “See a doctor,” she wanted to say. But she had learned from her father that men handle things, and she had learned from her mother that to say too much to a man was to interfere with what he had to handle. She wanted to believe that the silence was Horus working things through, that her love for him and plans for their life would keep him grounded. Suggesting that he see a doctor meant that she had missed something.
Now the only evidence that Horus had ever lived in the house was his large black umbrella. It was still in the vestibule corner, bent and dusty. Brenda sometimes thought she heard the doorbell ring and imagined that it was Horus wanting to come home. He was sorry about all the pain he caused her. What the courts said he had done never happened. He had stayed away to work things through, and now he was back. But she knew that no one would be standing there if she opened the door. His car would still be absent from the street, his side of the closet still empty. In those early months after the verdict—pregnant and miserable—she could not sleep in the bed they had shared, and she would get up and move to the bedroom chaise and then finally the couch downstairs. After Sephiri was born, she returned to the bed, and they cuddled there together on a fragile island of comfort. When he got older and she started struggling with him through the night, she was back on the living-room sofa. Staring into the shadows, her strained eyes had learned the shades of things, how light and gloom made war, how the living-room carpet moved in the dimness, ebbing and flowing in tides of indigo. Restlessness and exhaustion stalked her through a fog of fits and distractions that did not lift in the day. She tried everything to calm her nerves: chamomile tea, deep breathing, relaxation tapes, warm milk. Nothing helped.
Brenda struggled up from the couch and adjusted the wig she’d fallen asleep in. Sephiri had been awake most of the night, and she’d drifted off there. Horus had liked the soft, free-flowing natural she once wore. Her hair had long since thinned, and small patches had fallen out in some areas. The sides had already begun to gray. She looked on the floor and found that Sephiri was asleep where she’d spread his pillow and blanket. The television crackled with the static that had been playing on a channel all night. She stood up stiffly, her back aching, and opened the window curtain. She could see the perennial flowers she had planted in the small fenced front yard when she and Horus first bought the house. She hadn’t gardened in years, and the bright patches of black-eyed Susan and butterfly weed came up on their own now. In the months after the verdict, she thought about selling the house and moving. She felt it no longer housed the life it was meant for. But the rowhouse had been an abandoned crack den they bought for a song and renovated beautifully, and now she could not afford to live anywhere else so nice for the cost.
Brenda lumbered to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. It would take three cups to get through the morning and have Sephiri ready to go to the center on the van. There would be the long process of getting him upstairs and into the bathroom to help him use the toilet (if he had not already relieved himself on the bed or the floor), brush his teeth, and wash his face. She expected him to fuss through that. Then dressing him and fixing his hair. There would be some game he would start in between that involved him running through the house or hiding or climbing up and down the steps. Then there would be the ritual of making scrambled eggs and putting a plate of them in front of him so he would eat his breakfast cereal. She would eat them later, when they were stale and cold. Then there would be the rush to get herself together in the bathroom, all the while wondering what Sephiri was doing, listening for any sound that he might be in trouble or some other disaster he had caused. She would have to make sure his shoes were by the front door, so he would step into them when she opened it.
The thought of having to stop and speak to neighbors who were also starting their day when she came out of the house sickened her. The nosiness and insincerity was obvious in their veiled greetings. “Good morning, and how have you been, Ms. Brenda?” they would ask. Most of them knew all about Horus, having heard about the murder in the local news reports and discussed it with one another. Then they’d ask how Sephiri was coming along, all of them having watched his meltdowns in front of the house or heard him screaming through the windows. They knew that their children laughed and pointed and made jokes about Sephiri. Brenda would respond with bullshit, how she was well and couldn’t complain, how her boy was growing faster than wildfire, how she’d been working and getting on with everything. “Well, I’ve just been busy, you know, what with Sephiri and work and running the house,” she would say. It was all a beautiful lie, as iridescent as the Coral Paradise polish she brushed over her chipped nails at two o’clock in the morning.
The coffeemaker beeped, and Brenda poured a cup. She didn’t worry about what the neighbors said or thought anymore. But sometimes, in the brief pauses of the craze and haze of her life, she could feel the isolation. She could feel the loneliness. The marital bed remained in the room she once shared with Horus like an altar. She wondered if she ever would or could be with a man again, if she could feel desire and be desirable again. Sometimes she tired of that empty feeling and padded into the dark kitchen in search of mercy and grace from Häagen-Dazs. She stood in the light and frosty freeze of the opened refrigerator door, contemplating Rocky Road or Fudge Truffle.
Brenda took out a bottle of ibuprofen she kept in the locked kitchen-sink cabinet and swallowed three. A boom shook the ceiling, and she heard Sephiri shriek somewhere upstairs. She listened closer. There was silence for a moment, and then she heard him walking up and down the steps. She had learned to tell the difference between the sounds he made when he was upset, hurt, or occupied. When something did upset him, she would not know why, and he would not be able to tell her. Sometimes, when she looked into the bright little faces of other children, eyes so full of the wonder of bubbles and cartoons and laughter, she wished such joys for her boy. She had begun to fixate on the small things she felt she could offer him, although she had no way of knowing if what she did could ever make him happy: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, daily baths, cake once a month, television at four o’clock in the morning. She went over to the kitchen pantry and opened the door, studying the cereal boxes on the shelves.
Brenda heard another shriek, this one distressed, and she left the kitchen to find him. He was not on the stairs. She climbed the steps to see what was going on.
“Sephiri,” she called, now just a maternal reflex that held no purpose other than to announce that she was approaching.
She heard banging and then another shriek. She hurried up the last of the steps.
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sp; “Sephiri,” Brenda called again. She went to his room and scanned the floor: a few scattered toy cars turned upside down, bits of paper, broken crayons, a row of blocks down the center of the room, picture books stacked according to size. On the windowsill was a neat line of marbles. She pushed the bed aside to see if Sephiri was under it. Nothing. She was about to check the hallway bathroom when she heard him scream. It was coming from her room, and she rushed down the hallway.
He was in her bedroom closet, jumping up and down and flailing his arms. When Brenda tried to come near him, he only screamed louder. “What is it?” she asked, more of herself. Many of her things were disheveled. A blouse sleeve was ripped. Scarves were pulled from a basket. She saw that the blanket she had taken out of the storage bag in the closet the day before was on the floor. She’d been meaning to wash it later and hung it along the empty pole on the other side of the closet until she could get to it.
“Come out of there, Sephiri. It’s time to get ready to go to the center.”
The boy shrilled, violently beating his fists about his face.
Brenda was afraid he would injure himself and reached for his hands.
Sephiri picked up a shoe box and threw it. When she tried to take it from him, he grabbed one of the shoes and threw it at her, hitting her on the forehead.
“Dammit!” Brenda cried. “Stop, Sephiri.” She held his hands down to restrain him.
Sephiri screamed louder and louder, and Brenda felt a stabbing pain go through her head like a bolt of lightning. She thought of the day she knew something was different about Sephiri. When he was two years old, she took him to the National Zoo. She thought he would be thrilled to see the giraffes and the tigers. All through the outing, she tried to get his attention as he sat in his little stroller. “Look, Sephiri,” she said. But he kept staring down at a string he was fingering. She took him very close to the elephant habitat, and he did not look up once. Children holding ice cream cones and balloons walked by unnoticed. A little boy of about five years old proudly held his stuffed gorilla toy out to Sephiri, but he did not even glance at it. “Look, Sephiri,” she said. Her boy did not respond.
Now Sephiri struggled to break free of Brenda’s grasp, kicking at her legs as she tried to hold him still. When he kicked her in the stomach, she lost her grip on him.
It was at times like this that she thought it was all her fault. Somehow she caused the autism. She made it happen by hiding Sephiri’s existence from his father. God said that Horus had a right to know, and she ignored a law of nature. And this was her punishment: a child who was hidden from all reason, from his family, from the world.
Brenda went numb while Sephiri’s meltdown raged. By the time he was finished, he had pulled down all her clothes from the hangers, taken out every last shoe, and torn many of the shoe boxes to pieces. Then he shrank down on the blanket he had pulled to the floor and stared up at the empty pole, panting heavily.
“It’s OK, Sephiri,” Brenda said in a cracked whisper. “Mama’s here.” She touched his hand, unsure of what her words meant.
The boy did not move.
After Brenda got Sephiri on to the van to the Autism Center, she went back into the house. She called her job to let them know that she was going to be late. She went to the kitchen to get more coffee, sat down at the table, and held her head in her hands. Her temples throbbed with pain, and her backache had become more severe. A welt had formed on her forehead where Sephiri hit her with the shoe. She felt she couldn’t manage anything more this morning.
Brenda finished her coffee and headed upstairs to take a bath. She turned on the gushing water and looked at the wall behind the tub. There once was a panel of mirrors there. She and Horus used to stand together naked in front of it, his arms around her waist. She had talked of having children someday, and he had nodded. She used to consider herself lucky to have married Horus, a man far away from the Uncle Daddy her mother warned her about as a girl and the railroad man they never discussed.
Brenda had the mirror panels taken down and the wall painted white. They were in the basement now, a graveyard of things. The divorce papers were down there, too, decomposing with everything else. Her mother once told her that a good woman is a married woman. “In my day, vows wasn’t nothin’ to play with,” her mother said. Divorce was the way of the coward. “Husband and wife should hang in there,” she said. But when the verdict was proclaimed and the divorce papers from her husband came and she saw his signature on the line, she did not know what hanging in there meant. “He doesn’t want you to see him like that,” her husband’s attorney said over the phone. “Believe me, it is better this way.” She held on to the papers for months, anyway—wondering what was better—all through the morning sickness and the prenatal visits, the nights of turning on her side, and the baby’s delivery. But as time ground on, she couldn’t understand what she was holding on to. So she signed them and felt angry for years about it, until she was too exhausted to carry the outrage. She needed her strength for Sephiri.
Brenda turned off the tub faucet and undressed. It was a beautiful and deep claw-foot antique tub. It no longer held her comfortably, but she could at least sit down in it.
In those first days after the verdict, she submerged herself in it, trying to drown her sadness. She pressed her back against the rubber mat at the bottom of the tub, melting into the heat, plunging her head deeper under the water. And she thought, just for a second, about staying down in the water. Staying and never coming up. But the life inside her beat with her heart, and she could hear her mother’s voice. “A woman’s got to carry on,” she would say when times were tough. “What are we gonna do, Mama?” Brenda would ask. “I ain’t startin’ to quit now,” her mother would answer. But Brenda wondered if she had ever wanted to.
Squeezed into the tub now, Brenda looked over at the scale in the corner along the wall behind the toilet. She hadn’t been in to see her doctor again since he referred her to a nutritionist. The slip of paper was still at the bottom of her purse. In the long nights with Sephiri, she snacked on bags of potato chips and watched infomercials, awash in a sea of wealth-enrichment seminars, self-improvement retreats, and dietary programs. She consumed the ads like opiates, addicted to the solitude and fantasy of instant prosperity and losing ten dress sizes in thirty days. And she tried to imagine Sephiri’s smiling face.
The phone rang in her bedroom, and Brenda wondered if it was someone at the center or her job but made no effort to answer it. The machine picked up the call, and she heard one of the physician assistants from her doctor’s office leaving a message. “Please give us a call,” she said. Brenda soaped up, climbed out of the tub, and toweled herself off. She grabbed the little mop she kept in the corner, scooted the scale out into the middle of the bathroom, and stepped onto it. The scale read 273 pounds, fifteen more than the last time she checked. “You need to take care of yourself,” the old woman cashier said to her when she was loading the conveyer belt at the grocery store the other day. “If Mama goes down, everybody goes down.”
Brenda kicked the scale back behind the toilet and looked at herself in the mirror above the sink. She hardly recognized the woman looking back at her. “When I’m gone to glory, you keep on keepin’ on,” she could hear her mother say. “Try,” Brenda said to her reflection, her eyes welling up with tears. There were nights when she looked up at the stars and wondered if one of them was her mother twinkling.
Beautiful Day
That spring morning was unusually balmy and bright, the sky a swirl of blue watercolor. Horus parked across the street from a handsome brick house with a white fence and pink and red begonias in the yard. Seated in the car, he could see that there was a swing bench on the porch, and hanging fern plants suspended from a beam cascaded down in long tendrils. There was a tan Lincoln Town Car in the driveway. A blue water hose was neatly rolled on a spindle next to a flowering azalea bush. In the air was the sweet smell of new grass and firewood.
On the side of the
white mailbox, which stood proudly on the strip of grass near the curb of the lovely tree-lined street, were the words “The Teak Family” in press-on letters. Horus saw it the day before when he arrived in Scarsdale, New York, when he had driven by the house and back to the motel. He drove by three times. At the motel, he slept a sleep of bottomless soundless tumbling. He thought he dreamed about the press-on letters in the endless fall, except that in his dream, they read “The Thompson Family.” He thought he dreamed that he pulled the gun from his bedroom closet shelf and put it in the glove compartment of the car before leaving the house. He was not sure if he’d actually done that and did not want to spoil the meditative calm by leaning over and checking. It was still early, and he listened to the birds tweet in the trees and the squirrels start their day on the bark. The Sunday paper, wet with dew, was lying on the green carpet of the lawn. He wondered how long he could wait there before someone noticed a black man sitting in a car on a pretty street in Scarsdale and called the police.
He learned that Sam Teak had retired from the Brooklyn precinct. He wrote the address on a white slip of paper and carried it in his security uniform pocket, in his pajama shirt pocket, in his sweating palm. As he contemplated unlocked windows and ovens, as he sat up staring at the wilting flowers on the dining-room table at three o’clock in the morning, he thought about what it would be like to drive up and look at the house. To see one of the pillars of a community, a retired police officer, who was expecting to always be needed and kept his name listed in the phone directory so that someone who needed him could find him someday. People would vouch for him, protect him, turn the past into what his police reports said they were. He sent his kids to college and tithed at Christmas mass. He paid his mortgage and taxes.
Time of the Locust Page 14