Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

  On the walk to the car, I wondered what it felt like to have a face like yours, one of the most beautiful recognizable faces in our world, plastered on the wall at the biggest grocery store in North Jackson because you claimed you had money in the bank you didn’t really have. You were the only local black political scientist on TV during election season talking about politics. The way you overpronounced your words, defended poor black communities in the face of white resentment, and insisted on correcting everyone whose subjects and verbs didn’t agree made black folk in Jackson think we had plenty of lunch money, gas money, rent money, and light bill money.

  We didn’t.

  “Why’d they put a picture of your license up there, like you robbed a bank?” I asked you in the parking lot. “Can you tell me?”

  “I’m just tired, Kie,” you said. “You know how hard Grandmama had to fight to get line work in that chicken plant?”

  “I think I do,” I told you. “Want me to drive?”

  We were two miles from the house and you weren’t making a drop of sense. You talked like this a few years earlier before collapsing.

  “I’m just so tired,” you kept saying, now from the passenger seat. “I work hard, Kie. I really do. I work so hard. They never pay us what we’re worth. I try to tell Mama the same thing. Drive slowly, Kie.” I reached over and held the warm fold underneath the curve of your knee. That’s what you did for me when I was sad.

  By the time we made it home, you were snoring. I didn’t want to wake you so I turned off the Nova in the driveway and pushed the driver’s seat back. I sat there watching you breathe with your chin tucked into your left shoulder.

  I watched you sleep and thought about how a few weeks earlier, you had this party for your students at the house. You played a mix of Anita Baker, Sade, Patrice Rushen, and Phil Collins all night long. Malachi Hunter was there but he didn’t do much other than drink bourbon and watch you. The house was filled with students who’d fallen in love with you. Shareece wanted to watch you laugh. Cornell wanted to watch you dance. Carlton wanted to watch you talk. Judy wanted to watch you listen.

  Near the end of the night, you sat at a table with Beulah Beauford. You said something about how “infinitely finer” Denzel was than Bryant Gumbel or Dr. J, and everyone around the table burst out laughing. I watched you look up at Malachi Hunter, who was grinning ear to ear in the kitchen. Malachi Hunter knew, whether he deserved it or not, he’d been chosen by the freshest woman in our world.

  Sitting in the Nova, I took out my wallet, got your old license, and placed it on the dashboard. That summer day, the day Dougie said “running a train,” the day I left Layla alone at Beulah Beauford’s house, the day I slipped around the memory of what happened with Renata in our bedroom, the day you bought new encyclopedias intended to save my insides from white folk, you and I held on to each other like we were the first people in the world to float over, under, and around all the orange-red stars in the galaxy.

  • • •

  I might have liked the raggedy psychologist you got Hunter Malachi to pay for me to see two days later if she hadn’t tried so hard to talk proper, and ask me all these questions about parents, food, and church, or if you didn’t sit in the same room with us the whole time. The first question the psychologist asked was how I felt about my parents getting divorced.

  “I don’t think about it much,” I told her.

  She asked me to tell her everything I remembered about my parents being together. I told her how y’all met as sophomores and juniors at Jackson State University in 1973. I told her that ten months after y’all met, you were pregnant with me. My father was in Zaire during the entire pregnancy. You weren’t alone during the thirty-two-hour labor and C-section though. Grandmama was there. My father sent the name “Kiese” to you in a letter a few weeks before my birth. You told him you wanted my first name to be “Citoyen” and my middle name to be “Makeba,” after Miriam Makeba, the South African singer and freedom fighter.

  The psychologist thought I was lying when I told her I had no Mississippi memories of my father. I told her pictures showed me my father was in Mississippi with us. Pictures said he loved tight short shorts, and red, black, and green knit hats, and he appreciated pondering tough questions and getting high under the gritting teeth and pointed finger of Malcolm X. I told her my first memories of my father came after y’all stopped seeing each other in Madison. When you dropped me off one Saturday, you gave me some money Grandmama sent us. I was supposed to give my father the money so he could afford groceries. I didn’t remember how much it was, but I took a dollar of it and put it in my pocket before I handed it to him. It just didn’t make sense to me that we had no food in our fridge, yet here we were giving my father money Grandmama had given us.

  Life at my father’s Wisconsin apartment was different from our life. I remember both places having lots of music and incense, but there were so many rules at my father’s apartment. People had to take their shoes off when they came in. I couldn’t ever put my hands on the walls. One time I went to do laundry with him at the laundromat and he saw some skid marks in my underwear. He swore it was because you weren’t teaching me how to wipe my ass correctly. When I wiped my ass in his apartment, I couldn’t use more than four pieces of toilet paper. And the toilet paper had to be folded perfectly, not balled up. When we ate, my father had every bit of food planned out. And there was always lots of space between whatever he put on my plate.

  “Presentation matters,” I remember him saying. “So do patience and discipline. Take your time eating, son.”

  That day, my father brought out these snowballs he’d frozen from the winter so we could have a snowball fight in the summer. After the snowball fight, we walked down to the dumpster near our apartment complex, where we saw this baby raccoon. I’d never seen the baby of a raccoon, or possum, up close. I was so afraid, not just to touch it but to even witness it trying to live. My father picked me up and let me peek down deeper in the dumpster. The baby raccoon messed around in some trash with its crazy-short arms, then it looked up at us and I jerked my body back as fast as I could.

  I remember folding up my arms, sticking out my lips, and just looking at my father while he was dying laughing. It was the first time I’d ever seen him just be a normal goofy person. After a while, I followed my father behind the dumpster to Lake Mendota, where I watched him throw rocks at the sun that never came down.

  That’s what I told the psychologist about my memories of my father. For some reason, it made you cry.

  “Might you talk to me a bit more about violence?” the psychologist asked me after my story.

  I looked over at you. You were cross-legged, looking at me misty-eyed. “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  “What I mean is this: if you’re having problems with violence at school, I wonder how you’re experiencing violence at home.”

  “I ain’t having problems with violence at school,” I said. “I ain’t having problems with violence at home either.”

  The psychologist told me you said I had a violence problem. I wondered when you met with her and why I couldn’t have been there to just watch you talk like you were watching me. “Your mother contends you eat and drink things you shouldn’t be eating or drinking when you’re angry. She said you have turned to alcohol. I want you to tell me about your experiences with alcohol and violence at home or at school.”

  I looked over at you again. “I drank Mason jars of box wine three times when there wasn’t nothing else to eat or drink because it’s sweeter than water.”

  “Count to ten,” the psychologist abruptly told me.

  “What you mean?”

  “It’s clear you’re harboring anger over your parents’ separating and I think counting might help. Use this technique when you feel yourself getting angry about the divorce no matter where you are, or when you feel yourself wanting to drink wine, or eat sugary foods, go to the bathroom and count to ten.”

  “Is a technique l
ike a style?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I don’t feel nan amount of anger at all about them not being together,” I told her. “I mean, I got my grandmama, too. I don’t feel nan amount of anger at all over them being divorced. I be wishing my father paid child support more, but I’m good.”

  “Don’t say ‘be,’ ” you said from across the room. “Don’t say ‘nan’ either. He’s just showing out right now.”

  “I wish my father paid his child support on time,” I said. “But I’m good.”

  “Do me a favor,” the psychologist said as she walked us to the door. “Remember, in case of an emergency, I’d like for both of you to find a quiet space away from each other and just count to ten. If it’s dark, go outside and count at least ten stars. Everything that seems wrong might seem right if you just do this exercise. I think it might also help if you both limit your sugar and carbs and get more physical exercise.”

  • • •

  When we got home, you and I played our last game of one-on-one in the driveway. Your student Carlton Reeves put a goal in our front yard a year earlier and we’d played 21 a few times a month since then. When we first played, I was scared of how physical you were on offense and defense. I was taller than you, heavier than you, more skilled than you, stronger than you, but it didn’t matter. On offense, when you didn’t shoot your high arching one-handed jumpshot from your right hip, you backed me down by lunging your butt into my thighs. When you were close enough to the goal, you either shot a strange hook shot or pump-faked.

  That day, though, I was too tall to go for pump-fakes and my calves were too strong to let you back me down. I blocked your first three shots into the azaleas of the family next door. On offense, I just shot over you, or blew by you with a jab step left. That day, though, I realized I could have beaten you a year earlier. And you realized I could have beaten you a year earlier. And neither of us felt happy about that fact. I kept getting to twenty and missing the free throw on purpose so you could get closer.

  At some point, we had to decide if I would win. Your neck was glowing with sweat. I don’t know why but beating you felt harmful. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Knowing, or accepting I could beat you was enough for me. We both knew that game would be the last game we ever played no matter the score because we both knew, without saying it, you needed to not lose much more than I needed to win. When you made the last shot of the game, you celebrated, hugged my neck, told me good game, and held my hand.

  “Thank you for letting me win, Kie,” you said. “I needed that. And thank you for what you did today at the counselor’s office.”

  I remember looking at you and believing we’d turned a page in our relationship. We were about to limit our sugar and carbs. We were about to exercise more. And no matter what happened next, we would both go outside and count at least ten stars until everything wrong in our world felt right.

  WET

  “Kie, I’m not going to tell you again,” you said the next morning. We were sitting in the Nova in Beulah Beauford’s driveway. “Get out of this car.” I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t want to stay at Beulah Beauford’s house. You claimed you needed to go do some organizing and research in Sunflower County for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign and you didn’t want me at the house alone because someone broke in a few months earlier. I told you I knew you were lying and I knew you were going to see Hunter Malachi. “Kiese Laymon, I’m not about to tell you again. Get a grip. And get your fat ass out of my car.”

  I stood outside the Nova with my arms folded, covering my belly and my chest. You’d never called me fat. I didn’t think you saw it.

  “You better have that essay done when I pick you up, too,” you said. “I’m tired of playing with you.”

  From outside the door, I opened my wallet, got your old license out, and tossed it through the window of the car. You threw the license back out of the passenger window and reversed out of the driveway.

  Layla didn’t come back to Beulah Beauford’s house that Sunday but Daryl, Delaney, and Wedge did. I asked Dougie what happened after I left the house. He said everyone ate hamburgers, drank forties, and smoked weed until more girls came over. He said the girls who came over were older than Layla, and two of them had to go in Daryl’s room with all the big boys just like Layla did.

  Late that Sunday afternoon, I noticed almost all of us were in the pool except for Dougie. Sometimes when Dougie left, he’d just go make everyone cheeseburgers, but he’d been gone for a while so I got out of the pool, too.

  I walked back to Dougie’s bedroom. No one was there.

  I walked into the bathroom in the hall, but no one was there, either. Down the hall a bit from his room, I saw Daryl’s bedroom door cracked.

  I got close enough to the door to see Delaney was standing in the middle of the room with his soggy maroon swim trunks around his calves. Dougie was on his knees in front of Delaney with his hands behind his back. His tongue was out, licking the tip of Delaney’s penis.

  As soon as they saw me, Delaney pulled up his swim trunks. Dougie dusted his hands off on his Pittsburgh Steelers shirt and walked right by me with his head down. I turned, walked down the hall, and got ready to fight or sprint out of Beulah Beauford’s front door. Delaney grabbed my arm and asked me to sit down in the living room.

  I sat on the stool in front of Beulah Beauford’s piano and Delaney sat next to me. He told me he would teach me to play “Chopsticks” if I promised not to tell anyone what I saw.

  I sat with both fists balled up on my thighs. Part of me wanted Delaney to touch me again so I could try to kill him. But the biggest part of me was afraid Delaney might make me get on my knees, make me put my hands behind my back, make me lick the head of his penis until he said stop.

  I sat there, watching those still piano keys, and half listening to Delaney play and slowly talk his way through how he learned “Chopsticks.”

  When he was done, Delaney stood up and looked down at me one more time.

  “Don’t tell nobody, okay?” he said. “I’m serious. I was just playing with that boy. It was just a game. You hear me?”

  Grandmama always taught me to empty my pockets before I swung on somebody, so I went in both pockets, took out my wet wallet, and slammed your license down on the piano.

  Delaney looked at the ID. “That’s your mama? She work with my daddy. Please don’t say nothing to your mama. Your mama does not play. My daddy gone fuck me up if he finds out. I’m for real. That’s just how me and D be playing. I’m for real.”

  I followed Delaney out of Beulah Beauford’s front door and watched him sprint down the road like he was being chased until his wind got bad. That’s when he started walking, looking behind him, and pointing at me like his fingers were guns.

  A few seconds later, Delaney was out of sight.

  I sat down in Beulah Beauford’s rocky driveway and started making thick-lipped smiley faces with the rocks. My head hurt. I didn’t understand why Delaney thought teaching me “Chopsticks” would make what he did okay, or why Dougie’s hands were behind his back while he was on his knees. I didn’t understand why Delaney seemed so happy to be a part of a train but so scared for me to know what he did with Dougie. A part of me didn’t understand why the big boys wanted to be in rooms alone with Dougie and Layla and not me. A part of me knew it was because I was the fattest, sweatiest person in Beulah Beauford’s house.

  Ever since we were old enough to spend the night or day at our friends’ houses, we’d all play this game called “Hide and Go Get It.” One person had to count to thirty-five and the other people had to hide, usually in a dark closet or hallway. We played with boys and girls, but in the dark of those hallways and closets, sometimes folk would touch each other in ways they’d never touch each other when the lights were on. I was too afraid to touch anyone, but not too afraid to want to be touched. My body didn’t care if the person touching me was a boy or girl. My body felt grateful for tender touch no matter wh
ere it came from.

  Around the same time, girls and girls’ bodies and girls’ booties and girls’ touch made me feel not just special but sexier and more beautiful than boys’ touch and boys’ booties. I didn’t know why and I wasn’t sure how to use words to explain it. I didn’t know who would listen to me explain something so scary even if I thought I’d found the words. I kept thinking you should have been the one I talked with about it all since you were the one who taught me to read and write. But sexuality and bodies and feeling good and pain and tender touch and booties were something we never ever talked about.

  My body told different stories about you and Renata. Even though her touch was rough and yours was gentle, when either of you touched me, it all felt like love until it didn’t. Then it felt like dying. Though I had no idea what was going through Layla’s and Dougie’s heads and bodies as they walked in Daryl’s bedroom, I wondered if they ever felt love while they were in there with the big boys.

  I know I would have.

  Every half an hour, I went back into Beulah Beauford’s and called Malachi Hunter’s house looking for you. I hated that I could never forget Malachi Hunter’s phone number, hated how I could trace the shape of every syllable on his answering machine message.

  “You have reached the home of Malachi J. Hunter, the Alpha and Omega of Real Estate Agents in the new South. I am unavailable. Please leave a detailed message and I will return your call. Thank you.”

  Malachi Hunter’s favorite way to start sentences was “That damn white man.” According to Malachi Hunter, that damn white man’s crowning failure was that he overestimated himself and underestimated the resolve of “the revolutionary black man in Mississippi.” There were no black women, white women, or Mexican women in Malachi Hunter’s political imagination. But once I understood that Malachi Hunter was “the revolutionary black man in Mississippi” to Malachi Hunter, and being “the revolutionary black man in Mississippi” meant carrying himself like he saw rich radical white men carry themselves in Mississippi, I understood almost everything I needed to know about Malachi Hunter.