“Yeah, we’re friends, I guess.”
“You really think dolphins are as smart as humans?” I asked when the man promised to show us a dolphin giving birth.
Rebecca stared at the screen. The fund-raising woman came back on, asking for another thousand, and Rebecca got up and switched the television off. She pulled the elastic waistband down below her belly before she sat down again. “I think that stupid man is lying,” she said. “He knows dolphins are way smarter than any human!”
Eighteen
WHEN DANNY CALLED SATURDAY, I DID MY BEST NOT to eavesdrop but still couldn’t help overhearing snatches of the conversation.
“Ma and I talk almost every day, so you don’t have to give me the lowdown on the whole neighborhood,” Rebecca said into the phone from the upstairs hallway. From the living room, where I sat waiting for her, I could hear her clearly if I listened real hard.
“She told me Nikki was pregnant now but she’s not gonna have it.” There was a long pause. “She too young to be having babies anyway,” Rebecca said softly.
Five minutes later, after what seemed like a hundred I-love-you’s and other corny stuff, she hung up and we were on our way.
For six blocks the back of my throat burned with the question I had been dying to ask her for a long time. Rebecca chatted on and on about Danny and her friends in Harlem. She compared the brownstones in West Harlem with the small houses along the side streets in Seton. She laughed at the names of things—Hallerton Five and Dime, Beagle Road, Window Tree Lane—and told me stories about her brothers and sisters.
“Now, Bobo and Shaunney, they’re identical twins,” she said about the youngest in her family. “We used to make Shaunney wear a green ribbon around his wrist so we could tell them apart. Sometimes they’d switch and Bobo would wear the ribbon. Confuse everybody in the house except Ma.”
“Who would name their kid Bobo?”
“His real name is Elwood, but we gave him that nickname. All the kids get nicknames in Harlem—Bobo, Boo-boo, CeeCee, Little Man.”
“Who names them?”
“Anybody. People down the street, upstairs from you. Next-door neighbors. They say, ‘Now, who he look like? Don’t he favor Leon’s grandson, Bud? Come here, Li’l Bud.’ And the next thing you know, that’s your nickname.”
“What was your nickname?”
Rebecca looked embarrassed.
“Come on,” I said. “I won’t tell anybody.”
“Swear?”
“Cross my heart, hope to die.” I drew a cross on my chest with my index finger and pointed it toward heaven.
“Stinky,” she whispered.
“Stinky! Why’d they name you something like that?”
Rebecca shrugged, but I knew she knew the answer.
We laughed for nearly a block, until the tears streaming down our faces came close to freezing.
At the corner of Agauma and Seventh Street I took a deep breath, shoved my hands in my pockets, and looked at her.
“How come you decided to have the baby?” I asked.
Rebecca looked at me like she had been waiting a month and a half for this question. “I didn’t tell anybody I was pregnant,” she said, pulling her scarf closer to her throat. “I knew it, but I was real, real scared. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. So I just kept it hidden. It was easy because I always wear baggy clothes anyway.”
“How’d Clair finally find out?”
“She walked in on me in the bathroom. By then I was something like five and a half months. Man . . . my ma hit the roof in four different directions, she was so mad.”
“Then what happened?”
Rebecca looked down at the cracks in the sidewalks. “Then we both started crying. Me sitting there in the bathtub, Ma sitting on the toilet. We just cried and cried and cried. Like everything we ever had was all gone.”
“That must have been real scary.”
She shook her head. “By then I wasn’t scared no more. I was just sorry for what I had done and real sorry for hurting Ma.”
“Didn’t you and Danny ...” I hesitated. “Didn’t you have any . . . you know . . . like condoms or something?”
Rebecca shook her head again. “We were planning to get something. We were going to go to the free clinic down on St. Marks Place and stuff. But we had taken chances before and nothing happened. I guess we thought we could just take another chance. It was stupid.”
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Rebecca said, sounding old and convinced.
We walked a long way in silence, pictures of Rebecca and Clair crying in the bathroom popping in and out of my head.
Nineteen
THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF SHACKS IS THE SMALL STRETCH of land clear across the back roads of Seton where poor white people live. The shacks are small tin and tar houses with roofs slanting toward the street. The shacks’ windows are holes cut into the tin and filled with plastic. Before the poor families settled into them years ago, they had been the homes of squatters and coal miners, people passing through Seton with no plans to stay. Where the shacks stop, behind the high hills that curve around to hide them, black doctors and lawyers and bankers and public-relations people settled. With their families they hid themselves away from the shacks. A lot of kids in my neighborhood have never seen the back roads, or, as they call them, the shack roads. School buses stay down in the valleys on the other side or take the roads up on the hills, so that if you’re riding in one and look down, all you see is the slanted line of houses. Not the littered streets. Not the half-naked kids with dirty necks. Not the stray animals turning over garbage cans.
We stumbled on the neighborhood of shacks by accident. We had been touring Seton all day. I’d shown Rebecca the stores, Roper Academy, the gardens. But it was Saturday and Roper Academy was cold red boring stone. Closed. The gardens were flat with ice and snow, stretching for a mile and a half. Rebecca had grown restless quickly, and it was then that we saw him—a pale little boy in a ragged coat who couldn’t have been more than four years old.
“He must’ve gotten lost,” Rebecca said, moving toward him.
“He probably didn’t,” I said. “Kids around here walk around like that. They look for junk in the garbage cans.”
“How’s some mother gonna let a kid that small out in this cold weather to look in garbage cans? Answer me that!”
I shrugged, walking briskly to keep up with her. “That’s the way the people are around here.”
“You sound like a snob! A kid’s a kid.”
“I don’t like it over here, Rebecca. I’m going back.”
“You scared of this side of town? Is this what you were afraid to show me?”
“Of course not. It’s just dirty. It smells funny over here.”
A girl came out from one of the shacks and started walking toward us. Her dirty blond hair hung limply above her shoulders, and the side of her pale face was streaked as though, busy with a more important task, she had dragged a dirty hand across it to scratch an itch.
“Jason! Jason-Eliot. You get over here now, boy!”
“Mama!” the boy screamed, running over to the girl.
Rebecca froze. The girl couldn’t have been more than fifteen.
She held on to the boy and stared at me through half-closed eyes. I was wearing the leather bomber jacket I had gotten last Christmas. She looked at the sleeves, at the suede collar, at the wool pants I wore beneath it. Her stare stopped at my boots, made its way up to my jacket again, and stopped again somewhere just below my nose, more hate in her eyes than I have ever seen. The ragged child beside her put his thumb in his mouth and wrapped his other arm around her legs.
“You don’t live around here,” she said to me. “There’s no coloreds livin’ over ’cross this side.”
“Coloreds!” Rebecca laughed. “I haven’t heard that since Roots.” She looked around, then looked back at the girl and down at the little boy. “Thank God we don’t,�
� she said, glaring at the girl. “We just brought your baby back.”
“He know his way,” the girl said, prying the baby’s hand from her leg.
The girl looked at Rebecca. Her gaze traveled over Rebecca’s ragged scarf and down to her protruding stomach. Something in her eyes caught and she nearly smiled. “Come on, Jason-Eliot. I told you ’bout roaming the trash.”
“You’re welcome,” Rebecca called as the girl and Jason-Eliot turned and headed in the opposite direction.
We started walking back toward my neighborhood.
“It ain’t so bad,” the girl called. We turned back to see that she had stopped and was holding Jason-Eliot in her arms. “Once those pains come, it’s almost over. After that it ain’t so bad.” Then she turned again and continued down the gray snow and ice path toward the slanted shacks.
Rebecca and I turned back and silently headed up the high hills toward home.
Twenty
WHEN MA CAME HOME LATE MONDAY NIGHT WITH A pizza, Marion, Bernadette, Rebecca, and I were doing breathing exercises, sitting four across, Native American style, in front of the television.
“Come join us,” Bernadette said, her forehead shiny with sweat beneath her braids.
Bernadette’s mother and father moved here from Kenya soon after they married. Wanting to Americanize as quickly as possible, they moved to the Long Island suburbs, had two children, and named them Thomas and Bernadette. Even now, when Bernadette tells the story, she laughs about it. And even though I’ve heard the story at least a thousand times, I can sit through it another thousand just to catch the spark in Bernadette’s dark eyes when she recounts it, just to play with the cornrows gliding down her back while she tells it.
“You were supposed to hold it for a count of ten, Bernadette.”
“No way. When you get to be my age, the count goes down to six.”
“Same here,” Marion said, rising. “I can’t even breathe as deeply as that lady on the screen. She must have a set of lungs on her!”
“You smoke too much,” Rebecca scolded, closing her eyes and pressing her hands against her stomach.
“Thanks, Clair Junior,” Marion said, following Bernadette into the kitchen.
“Marion and Bernadette make a nice couple,” Rebecca whispered.
“They’ve been together long enough.”
“If the Robertses hadn’t asked for the baby first, I’d give him to them.”
I blinked. “You’ve come a long way. When you first came here, you didn’t even like Marion!”
“I didn’t know her,” Rebecca said. “How you gonna judge someone you don’t know?”
I smirked. “Now you do the short exhales and I count, Rebecca,” I said, pressing the mute button.
“Okay.”
We did the exercise four times.
“I’m starved,” Marion was saying to Ma in the dining room. “Pour Rebecca a larger glass of milk, Catherine. And put an iron pill beside her plate.”
“I thought she only took these in the morning.”
“Dr. Greenberg said she needs to take one at night too.”
“What else did she say?”
Ma was putting another plate at the end of the table when we sat down.
“She said the baby’s fine,” Rebecca said, searching for a comfortable position in the straight-back chair. “He’s just moving slower these days. She said there’s a chance the baby might be premature because I’m so young or something.”
“Did she recommend anything?”
“Bed rest,” she said, taking a slice of pizza from the box and picking off a chunk of cheese. “My blood pressure is too high. She said it’s too much excitement for me.” Her look said, That’s a joke.
“You have to stay in bed for a month?” I asked.
Rebecca nodded. “At least, stay around the house.”
“Well, what about your breathing classes?” Ma asked.
“She said I shouldn’t worry about that right now. The baby will come whether I take classes or not.”
“What about studying?” Bernadette asked.
“I guess I can’t do that either. Especially math—”
“Studying’s fine, Bernie,” Marion interrupted. “Just so long as it doesn’t mean long walks through Seton and heavy lifting.”
“Ah-haaa. Got you!” I laughed.
Rebecca smirked.
“And what about the Robertses?” Ma asked. “Have you spoken to them?”
“Who’re the Robertses?”
“They’re the ones adopting the baby, Feni. Those people I told you about,” Rebecca said. “They’re coming by to see me a week from Wednesday. Hope that’s cool with you.”
“It’s fine,” Ma said, Bernadette and Marion nodding in unison. “We just want you to be sure you’re making the right decision. I know you don’t want to raise a baby where you’re living now, but there are some beautiful places there in Harlem. I’m not trying to talk you into keeping him or anything. I just don’t want you to think you made the wrong choices.”
“I know there are beautiful places, but not where I live. I have to take care of my brothers and sisters. I don’t think I could raise a baby right. I wouldn’t want him to have to live off welfare like we gotta do now. It would be too much. I know in my heart it isn’t the right time now. Danny, he’s cool and everything, but he’s only seventeen. He’s not ready to be nobody’s daddy.”
“You sound like you know what you want,” Ma said. After a moment she added, “And I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m glad too,” Bernadette said.
“Count me in,” Marion added, raising her hand.
Rebecca looked up at them, her face a mixture of embarrassment and pride.
Ma picked up her slice and rose. “I need to go make some phone calls so I can be home Wednesday morning. I’ll drop Feni off at school and head back over here.”
“You’re not working on a Wednesday, Ma?”
“I’ll work at home. I want to be here to meet the Robertses.”
“Can’t I stay home too? I haven’t missed school all year. Please, Ma?”
“Can she, Ms. Harris?” Rebecca pleaded. “Please.”
Ma sighed. “I guess so. How’d you do on that history test?”
“Ninety-eight.”
Rebecca shot me a smarty-pants look.
“I figured you must have done well, since I didn’t hear anything from Roper. You can stay home if Rebecca doesn’t mind.”
“No. It’ll be cool. We’re friends now.”
Marion and Bernadette looked up, and Ma, heading toward her den, stopped halfway across the floor. “Friends?” she asked.
I picked some of the cheese off Rebecca’s slice, looked her square in the eye, and nodded.
Twenty-one
A WEEK LATER CAESAR CAME HOME WITH ME AFTER school. All the way home she talked about the cotillion.
“I’ve decided to wear a blue gown,” she said as we headed up Bailey Street. “Don’t you think blue would look great on me? Blue with lace. I want lots of lace. What color do you think you’ll wear?”
“Caesar, I told you. I’m not coming out.”
“Your mother’s going to make you do it.”
“My mother doesn’t care about that junk. That was my father, and he’s gone now. He can make his new daughter come out if he wants, but not me.”
“It’s going to be so fun. Remember Vanessa, who’s at Howard now?”
I shook my head. “Uh-uh.”
“Well, hers was so beautiful. She wore yellow. She looked so pretty, Feni. The dress was cut in a V in the back, but I think I want a high collar. Maybe I’ll wear white instead of blue.”
At my door Caesar stopped talking and looked around nervously. “You sure your mother isn’t home?”
“Positive,” I said, taking out my keys. “She’s working.”
“Do I look okay?”
“You look fine, Caesar.”
“Wait,” she said, grabbing my hand. �
��Are you sure she’ll like me? I mean, maybe I should come over some other—”
“Caesar. Don’t worry. She’s not a monster, just a pain sometimes.”
“You think she’ll tell us how it felt?”
“No. And don’t ask!”
Rebecca was watching cartoons when we came in. Caesar glanced around, then walked over to the top of the two steps that lead down into the living room. “Is that her?” she whispered.
“Yes, it’s me,” Rebecca said. She turned, she and Caesar taking each other in from head to toe.
“Is it show-and-tell day?” Rebecca said finally, turning back to the television.
“Where’s Bernadette?” I asked, pulling Caesar’s coat off her shoulders while she stared.
“She had to leave early. She teaches on Tuesday nights.”
“I’m Caesar,” Caesar finally stuttered, moving slowly toward Rebecca.
“I know,” Rebecca said, not turning away from the TV. “And I know you know who I am.”
“Feni told me a-about you. She said you were, ahm, she said—”
“She told me the same things about you.” Rebecca leaned back against the couch, smirking.
“You’re supposed to be in bed, Rebecca.” I hung Caesar’s coat on the rack.
“I can’t stay,” Caesar said. “You don’t look so young,” she said to Rebecca. “I hope you have a girl.”
“It doesn’t matter what it is,” Rebecca said. “I just want it to be healthy.”
“Then I hope it’s a healthy girl. Can I touch your stomach?”
“Caesar!”
“I was waiting for her to offer, but she didn’t and I have to go.”
“Sure, I guess.” Rebecca looked at me, raising an eyebrow.
I shrugged.
Caesar took small steps closer to Rebecca. They looked at each other a moment before she reached out to touch Rebecca’s stomach.
“That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever felt,” she said, smiling. “Is it going to hurt?”
“It hurts now!” Rebecca said. “Didn’t you feel that kick? This baby isn’t playing.”
“I think I would absolutely die!” Caesar said, reaching out to touch Rebecca’s stomach again.
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