Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

  From outside the doorway, I could see Layla sitting up, putting on her swimsuit. I’d only been this close to three naked women in my life: you, Grandmama, and Renata.

  “You got me something to drink, Big Keece?”

  “I got you some lemonade like you asked me to,” I said, still not fully in the room. “And a strawberry Pop-Tart if you want half.”

  “I want half.”

  I’d never kissed anyone my age and I worried if Layla tried to kiss me, my lips would be chappy, or my breath would stink like bleu cheese, or at some point she’d maybe see my stretch marks and the big flat mole on my left butt cheek.

  I took Layla’s ID out of my pocket, grabbed the apple Now and Laters out of my other pocket, put both on the ground to the left of the door. Then I moved the cup of Kool-Aid and the strawberry Pop-Tarts on top of the ID.

  “Walk with me out to the pool?” she asked me. “I don’t want to go out there by myself.”

  “Why? You think Daryl and them trying to laugh at you?”

  Layla held the strap on her left shoulder and looked down at the Kool-Aid. “I don’t,” I remember her saying. “I don’t think they’ll laugh at me. They said I had to go in the bedroom if I wanted to swim in the deep end. So that’s what I did.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you think they gone laugh at me?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I mean, they be laughing when they nervous. Why you call it yellow Kool-Aid and not lemonade?”

  “ ’Cause that’s what it is to me,” she said. “It’s yellow and it’s Kool-Aid. Ain’t no lemons in it. Walk out there with me?”

  I remember my back facing the opposite side of Daryl’s room and wondering if there was a real word for stories filled with people who started off happy and then got sad. “Happysad,” no space and no hyphen, was the word I used in my head. Telling happysad stories about what just happened was really all the big boys at Beulah Beauford’s house did well. Whether they were true or not didn’t matter. What mattered was if they were good stories. Good stories sounded honest. Good stories made you feel like you didn’t see all of what you thought you just saw. I knew the big boys would tell stories about what happened in Daryl’s bedroom that were good for all three of them and sad for her in three vastly different ways. I wanted to tell Layla some of the happysad stories of our bedrooms but I wasn’t sure whether to begin those happysad stories with “I” or “She” or “He” or “We” or “One time” or “Don’t tell nobody” or “This might sound nasty to you but . . .”

  “I’m starting not to feel so good,” I heard Layla say behind me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Without turning around, I whispered, “Me either. I mean, me too.” Then I took off out of Beulah Beauford’s house, leaving Layla to walk by herself toward the deep end.

  The run home was a little more than a mile. I ran a lot of sprints in basketball and football practice, and I always felt fast for my size, but I’d never run a mile nonstop. Running a mile for heavy kids like me had everything to do with your brain and your heart forgetting you were running a mile. That’s what Dougie, Layla, and me loved about the deep end. For however long you were in it, for a few minutes of your life, no matter how the big boys laughed at us, our bodies forgot how much they weighed.

  Then they remembered.

  • • •

  When you and I lived in apartments off Robinson Road, your student Renata came over to babysit a few times a week. Renata, who was bowlegged in one leg, always made pork chops, rice, and gravy. We watched Mid-South Wrestling Saturday night. After Mid-South Wrestling, Renata asked me to come to your bedroom so she could put me in the figure four. While I was on my back bracing myself for pain, Renata told me she loved how my cutoff sweatpants made my thighs and calves look. No one ever said they liked my calves or my thighs before Renata.

  When Renata asked if I wanted a sip of her thick Tang, I tried to drink from a part of the cup she hadn’t drank from because you told me never to drink after anyone. When Renata asked me why I didn’t want to drink after her, I told her because you told me I could get herpes drinking after randoms with chappy lips. “Your mama is the smartest and funniest person I’ll ever know,” she told me.

  “That’s cool,” I said, and placed my lips right where she pointed. The Tang tasted sweeter than a melted Popsicle and way more sour than a pickle.

  “It’s good, right?” she asked. “Does it make you want to kiss me?”

  I didn’t know how to be anything other than scared at the thought I was about to have my first real girlfriend. I remember just fake smiling and drinking more Tang so I could have something to do with my hands.

  When I was done with the Tang, Renata pulled up her shirt, unhooked her bra, and filled my mouth with her left breast. She used her right hand to pinch my nostrils until I could only breathe out of the corners of my mouth.

  I held my mouth open as wide as I could, hoping not to cut Renata’s breast with my crooked front teeth. I remember praying to God the Tang overpowered the pork chop, rice, and gravy smell on my breath. I didn’t think Renata would want to stay my girlfriend if I made one of her nipples smell like pork chops, rice, and gravy. Choking on Renata’s breasts made me feel lighter than I’d ever felt. After a few minutes, Renata grabbed my penis and kept saying, “Keep it straight, Kie. Can you keep it straight?” She kept breathing in a way that sounded like she loved whatever her body was feeling. The sound of her breathing made me feel sexy for the second time in my life.

  Nearly every time Renata came over to take care of me, she put me in a figure four, choked me, and asked me to keep it straight. When she came over and didn’t choke me or ask me to keep it straight, I wondered what was wrong with me. I always assumed it was because my thighs and calves weren’t muscly enough. On those days when she didn’t touch me, I didn’t eat or drink and I did calf raises and squats in the bathroom until I cramped.

  After a few months, Renata’s real boyfriend came over while she babysat. They drank thick Tang together. Once, when they thought I was asleep, I heard her wailing in the closet and making the same sounds she made with me.

  I heard Renata’s real boyfriend say, “You better not say no either.” Then I heard Renata start cussing him out. I opened the closet door and saw them both standing up, sweaty and naked. Her real boyfriend had the body of Apollo Creed but his neck was longer. I’d never seen Renata’s whole naked body that close up. I felt amazed someone with a fine body like hers and a real boyfriend who had a fine body like Apollo Creed would want anything to do with a wide messy body like mine. “Close the closet, little fat, looking-ass nigga,” her real boyfriend told me. “Fuck is you looking at?”

  When I told them I was going to get your gun to shoot them in the foreheads, they both ran out of the house with half of their clothes on. Renata decided not to be my girlfriend anymore. I never saw her again. I knew it was because my legs were fat and I made her breasts smell like pork chops, rice, and gravy the first time she pushed them in my mouth. You got mad at me that night because your bed looked like two people had been in it. I told you I wasn’t in the bed with Renata. I didn’t tell you I wanted to be.

  • • •

  The day I sprinted away from Beulah Beauford’s house, I sat out in the driveway of our house for hours thinking about what I heard outside of Daryl’s bedroom and what I felt in our bedroom. You made me read more books and write more words in response to those books than any of my friends’ parents, but nothing I’d ever read prepared me to write or talk about my memory of sex, sound, space, violence, and fear.

  Usually, when I wanted to run from memory, I transcribed rap lyrics, or I drew two-story houses, or I wrote poems to Layla, or I watched black sitcoms, or I thought about new ways to act a fool in class, or I shot midrange jump shots, or I ate and drank everything that wasn’t nailed down. I could
n’t do any of what I wanted to do in our driveway, waiting for you to come home.

  When you got home the evening I left Beulah Beauford’s house I hugged you, thanked you, told you I loved you. I hated, for the first time, how soft my body felt close to yours. I knew I’d either get a whupping or have to write lines for not doing the assignment you told me to do. Lines were a number of long repeated written sentences explaining what I would do differently, beginning with “I will . . .” I hated writing lines, and always wrote one fewer half line than I was assigned, but I hated getting beaten by you even more.

  You turned the lights on when we got in the house and stood in front of one of the bookcases. “What do you see, Kie?” you asked me.

  I looked first at your oversized blue dashiki, your wide feet squeezed into a pair of Beulah Beauford’s shoes, the shiny keloid on your forearm, and your mini fro leaning slightly left.

  “Not on me, Kie,” you said. “What do you see behind me?”

  When I was thinking of how to answer your question, you told me you were getting closer to defending your dissertation up in Wisconsin. I hugged your neck, told you how proud I was of you, and asked if that meant you were about to be a real doctor and if being a real doctor meant you’d be making a lot more money.

  “Look,” you said, and pointed to the bottom shelves of the bookcase. Sitting behind you were the bluest books I’d ever seen. I asked you how we were going to pay for the books since we didn’t have enough money for lights or rent. “Kiese Laymon, do you like the encyclopedias or not?”

  I stood up and ran my hands along the spines. You usually only said my whole name when I was about to get a whupping. “Does this mean I don’t have to go to Beulah Beauford’s house no more?”

  “Smell the books,” you said, and opened the encyclopedia on the far left. “Get a grip. And don’t say ‘no more.’ Say anymore.”

  “Anymore,” I said, and put my nose as close as I could to the spine of the book. You told me my first assignment was to use our encyclopedias to write a two-page report on Jim Crow and freedom strategies used by black elected officials in Mississippi, post-Reconstruction. The report was due by the end of the week.

  “Um,” I told you before you walked to your room to call Malachi Hunter, “I think I want to lose weight. Can you help me? I be sweating too much when I try to talk to people I don’t want to be sweaty around.”

  “You mean girls, Kie?”

  “I guess I mean girls.”

  “If someone doesn’t like you for you,” you said, “they are not worth sweating around. Save your sweat for someone who values it. I think I’m gaining all the weight you want to lose in my thighs.”

  Your thighs were always thick, but I could see even less of your cheekbones in the last few months. Your neck looked a lot shorter. Your breasts seemed heavier when you walked around the house in your huge raggedy Jackson State T-shirt. You looked even more beautiful to me.

  We played Scrabble that evening and I beat you for the second time in our lives. You asked for a rematch, and I beat you again. “I’m surprised you didn’t try to spell ‘be’ or ‘finna’ every chance you got,” you said as you walked toward our new encyclopedias. I watched you stand in front of the encyclopedias with your sweatpants and JSU T-shirt on. You smiled ear to ear as you gently fingered through half of the books. “The day your grandmother brought home a set of encyclopedias for us was the happiest day of my childhood, Kie.”

  “Do I have to go to Beulah Beauford’s house anymore to use her encyclopedias if we have our own?”

  You responded to my question with a question, which is something you said was illegal in our house, and asked if I used Beulah Beauford’s encyclopedias to write the essay or short story you told me to write. “If you didn’t write the essay or the story, what did you do?” You actually stood there, with an encyclopedia in hand, waiting for an answer. “Answer me, Kie. Don’t tell a story either.”

  I thought about what I did, what I wrote, what I saw and heard, and how I ran away. I imagined Layla telling a story of that day. I could hear her telling it in a style that made me better than the big boys. I could hear her telling it in a style that made me worse. I could mostly hear her telling it in a style that centered her and made the big boys, Dougie, and me the same kind of blurry and terrible.

  When I didn’t answer your question, you said my not doing the essay was another tired example of refusing to strive for excellence, education, and accountability when excellence, education, and accountability were requirements for keeping the insides of black boys in Mississippi healthy and safe from white folk.

  I stood there watching you, feeling a lot about what it meant to be a healthy, safe black boy in Mississippi, and wondering why folk never talked about what was needed to keep black girls healthy and safe. My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, express. It knew that all over my neighborhood, boys were trained to harm girls in ways girls could never harm boys, straight kids were trained to harm queer kids in ways queer kids could never harm straight kids, men were trained to harm women in ways women could never harm men, parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them. I didn’t know how to tell you or anyone else the stories my body told me, but, like you, I knew how to run, deflect, and duck.

  “Kiese Laymon, what did you do instead of writing your essay?” you asked me again. “I am going to ask you one more time and I am going to get my belt. Why did you not do the work I told you to do?”

  I wanted to tell you I hated when you didn’t use contractions. Instead I said, “I’m sorry. I just got tired of swimming in the deep end at Beulah Beauford’s house, and I wanted to come home. I won’t do it again. Thank you for the new encyclopedias. I know they gone protect my insides from white folk.”

  “Going to,” you said. “Don’t say ‘gone’ or ‘gonna,’ Kie. ‘They are going to protect your insides.’ If you know better, do better. Promise me you will do better.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. Do you promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say it.”

  “I promise,” I said. “I promise.”

  You didn’t beat me. You made me write ten lines instead. I wrote nine and a half because I was hardheaded.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.

  I promise to read and write as I’m told.

  NAN

  Later that night, at Jitney Jungle, you filled our cart with cream of mushroom soup, tuna, name-brand wheat bread, and a big bottle of off-brand cranberry juice. I asked you if I could get the latest issue of Right On! magazine because Salt-N-Pepa were on the cover. You told me to just read it while we waited in line. When we walked up to the checkout, I put all the food on the conveyor belt and watched it glide away from us. Behind the cashier, pinned to a board, were a number of checks and Xeroxes of licenses, with the words DO NOT ACCEPT NAN CHECK FROM THESE CUSTOMERS in all caps. A Xerox of your license and one of your checks from Trustmark was in the middle of the board. Your check looked like the undisputed champion of bounced check
s at Jitney Jungle.

  “Let’s go,” I said as I watched you go in your purse and pull out your checkbook. “I ain’t even hungry.”

  “Kie, do not say ‘ain’t.’ ”

  “Okay. I won’t say ‘ain’t’ again,” I told you. “Can we just go?”

  You looked in the direction of the older black woman cashier. She looked like a black version of Vera from the TV show Alice, but she had thicker lips and smaller teeth. “These folk don’t even know when to use ‘nan’ or when to use ‘any,’ ” you said. I wasn’t sure if you saw your picture or not, but I watched your shoulders dip as air left your chest. “You’re right, Kie,” you said. “Let’s just go. There’s tuna and crackers at home.”

  I told you I thought the person who wrote the sign, just like Grandmama, used “nan” to mean “not any” or “not one.”

  “Don’t excuse mediocrity,” you told me.

  “So Grandmama is mediocre?”

  “Grandmama had to work for white folk instead of going to high school, and she finished high school through correspondence classes. She has an excuse to use the language she uses. What are these people’s excuse?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t even know them.”

  “Don’t excuse mediocrity, Kie,” you told me again as we walked out of the store hand in hand. You looked toward the sky. “I hope Grandmama is out on her porch looking at the stars tonight. The sky is so clear.”

  Every now and then, Grandmama sent these Mason jars of pickles and pear preserves. Or she gave us pounds of government cheese, peanut butter, and crackers near the middle of the month. Grandmama laughed and laughed until she didn’t when I called the cheese Gourmet African American cheese. You tried to act too good to eat Gourmet African American cheese, but sometimes I caught you making these buttery grilled Gourmet African American cheese sandwiches with something ultrabougie like pumpernickel bread. I couldn’t understand why you were so ashamed of eating like we didn’t have much money, so ashamed of demanding my father pay his child support.