Disappearing Acts

by Terry McMillan

  Franklin stumbled into the bedroom.

  “Wake up,” he said. “I know you ain’t asleep.”

  “How did you know I wasn’t asleep? It’s after eleven o’clock, Franklin. You know what time I go to bed.”

  “Yeah, you a deadbeat, all right. I need some pussy, baby.”

  “Franklin, please.”

  “Please, my ass. I want some pussy, and you gon’ give me some tonight whether you want to or not.”

  “Oh, so you’re going to rape me, is that it?”

  “I guess so.”

  And he was telling the truth. He quietly walked over to the bed, pulled up my nightgown, and told me not to move. And I didn’t. I couldn’t believe this. This couldn’t be the man I had fallen in love with. This couldn’t be Franklin Swift doing this to me. But it was. He managed to get his clothes off, and to my surprise he was erect, which meant he’d had this whole thing planned. I wasn’t about to try to fight him, because there was no telling what he might do. So I gave in.

  He put all 238 pounds of his body weight on me, and even though I could hardly move, I didn’t say a word. I just lay there, numb as a rag doll.

  He jabbed it in me as deep as he could.

  “Franklin, take it easy. That hurts.”

  “I want it to hurt,” he said. “Now move, goddammit.”

  So I moved.

  In less than five minutes he was through.

  “That’s all I wanted,” he said, and pushed me to my side of the bed.

  I got up to go clean myself. “Get back here,” he said.

  “I’m just going to wash this stuff off.”

  “I want you to sleep in it, so you’ll know you slept with a real man all night. Now lay down.”

  I got back in bed, and that’s when I heard Jeremiah crying. I didn’t know what to do, I was so scared.

  “That’s the baby, Franklin,” I said.

  “So?”

  “So I can’t just let him cry.”

  “So go get him. Ain’t nobody stopping you. But do me a favor. Don’t bring the little bastard in here. I don’t feel like hearing it.”

  I walked into Jeremiah’s room and picked him up. He was the only thing that felt real to me.

  We slept on the couch.

  * * *

  In the morning, Franklin woke me up.

  “I wanna talk to you,” he said.

  “Good, because you owe me an apology, Franklin.”

  “I don’t owe you nothing.”

  I just looked at him. I swear, I wanted to spit in his face.

  “I been thinking. Since you been doing everything around here anyway and shit, and since I don’t feel needed or necessary, and since you probably had it planned on being a single mother all along, I’ma give you the opportunity to do just that.”

  “Just what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I want out. I need a break from you. From this kid. From everything. My head is all fucked up. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I need to be by myself for a while.”

  “Oh, so you’re leaving us?”

  “Call it what you wanna call it. But by Thanksgiving, I’ll be gone.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “I figured you’d say that,” he said, and was out the front door.

  I lay there for a few minutes and didn’t feel anything. Did he say he was leaving us? Jeremiah was still asleep, and just the thought of starting the day caused me to lose every drop of energy I thought I had. I wasn’t going anywhere today. Leaving us? Then I suddenly felt this incredible feeling of relief. Leaving? Good. Go, I thought. We can make it a helluva lot easier without you. Go. Go. Go. I picked up my slipper and threw it at the door. “Go!”

  Though I didn’t go to work, I took Jeremiah over to Mary’s house anyway. I needed to be by myself. To think. I didn’t feel as drained as I had earlier, and something told me to pick up the phone and call that woman I’d met at my baby shower whose husband was a record producer. Before I knew it, I had dialed her number. Her husband answered the phone. I hadn’t planned on talking to him, hadn’t rehearsed my speech and had no idea what to even say to him, so I just told him what I’d been doing and where I’d been trained and all that, in one breath.

  To my surprise, he knew Reginald, who had trained some of the people he’d produced. “Look,” he said, “I’m always looking for new material. Do you have a tape you can send me?”

  “I sure do.”

  “You’ve got it all copyrighted?”

  “Yes, I do. Reginald made sure I did that. And look, I appreciate this, really, and don’t feel obligated to get right back to me, because I understand how busy you are. Really I do. And if you don’t like my music, my feelings won’t be hurt.” Then I realized I was lying. “Yes, they will.”

  He started laughing and told me he’d get back to me as soon as he came home from a road tour, which wouldn’t be until the first of the year.

  I didn’t have anything but time.

  30

  I didn’t have nowhere to go.

  I was really calling her bluff, trying to see if she wanted me to go. Or better than that, I wanted to beat her to the punch. I knew my days was numbered and that she probably been plotting how she was gon’ get me outta here. But my name was on this lease, just like hers was, so the only way I was gon’ leave was by making the decision myself.

  It ain’t that I don’t love Zora no more. It ain’t that at all. I just done disappeared. I don’t know who the fuck I am no more. And that pisses me off. I’m taking it out on her, I can see that. I’m jealous of my own son, and that shit ain’t right, and I know it, but I don’t know what to do with all this rage. All this anger I done accumulated. I gotta find the right outlet for it, though; that much I do know. And in order to do it, I gotta get away from her and Jeremiah. I gotta start all over. From scratch. The same way I was trying to do it when I first met her. When I think about it, I did the shit all wrong. If I remember correctly, it was my foundation I was working on, my constitution. Shit. But what did I do? Fell in love when I didn’t have nothing to offer no woman of her caliber. And I knew that shit from jump street. She been to college. She already had accomplished something with her life, and she was still trying to do more. That was one of the things I liked about her. But now the shit is backfiring, pissing me off, and I know why. ’cause I still ain’t no-goddamn-where.

  And Zora didn’t even try to understand why I didn’t wanna pick Jeremiah up from the baby-sitter. She didn’t have no fuckin’ idea how embarrassing that shit woulda been for me. So I used waiting for a phone call and my woodworking as a excuse—but that wasn’t it. I couldn’t stand the thought that all the people in that house knew I wasn’t working, knew it was Zora paying her, and I didn’t want to be looked at and see the question in their eyes, like, “What do you do all day?”

  What I do all day is drink and stare at the walls and listen to music. Which is what I was doing today when the doorbell rang. It was the mailman. He had a package for Zora that wouldn’t fit in the box. I brought all the mail upstairs and looked at that big brown envelope. It didn’t have no return address on it, and I wanted to know what it was, so I opened it. I couldn’t believe it. A fuckin’ calendar of black men in bathing suits and shit. Why the fuck couldn’t she wait till I was gone to bring some shit like this in here? I threw it on the kitchen table and sat back down on the floor and turned the music up. The longer I sat there, the madder I got. She ain’t gotta throw the shit in my face, not like this. Here I been waiting for her to put her arms around me at night and tell me she don’t want me to go, tell me she still loves me, still believes in me, but the deal is, she wants my ass outta here. I shoulda guessed. ’cause ever since I told her I was leaving, she been strutting through this house happy as a little fuckin’ lark. I been sleeping on the couch, ’cause I don’t even want the pussy no more.

  Ronald Reagan’s wrinkled red face was on the TV, but I had the sound off ’cause I was mad that Jesse didn’t
win. I voted for the brother. The ashtray was overflowing when Zora walked in with Jeremiah, and I was blasting the Temptations’ new side, “Treat Her Like a Lady.” I knew she was gon’ wanna confront me, ’cause Thanksgiving was only four days away.

  Jeremiah’s cheeks was red. I looked over at the window, and it was snowing and dark. She looked worn out, but that’s what she get, trying to be superwoman.

  “Could you turn that down a little bit?” she asked me.

  I didn’t feel like it, but I did anyway.

  She started taking off Jeremiah’s snowsuit. She put him on the floor and he staggered over to me. I put him on my lap.

  “Franklin, do you know what day it is?”

  “Yeah, I know what day it is. Why?”

  “You said you’d be gone by Thanksgiving, and you haven’t started packing or anything.”

  “You got somebody else moving in here on Thanksgiving?”

  “Be serious.”

  “So don’t rush me.”

  “You’re the one who said when you’d be leaving, and I’ve got arrangements I have to make.”

  “Like getting one of them motherfuckers on that calendar to come over and oil that dry-ass pussy?”

  “What calendar?”

  “That one right there, and if you don’t want me to break your fuckin’ neck, you better get it outta here. You got some nerve, you know that. I ain’t left yet, and you already bringing this kinda shit in the house.”

  “Who told you to open my mail?”

  “I did.”

  “Who was it that brought you Players magazine’s calendar of naked women and hung it up in your workroom for you?”

  “That ain’t the point. All I’m saying is you got five minutes to get it outta here, or you gon’ be sorry.”

  She jumped up and put it some-damn-where, and came and took Jeremiah from me.

  “I need some more time,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “To leave. I ain’t got my plans worked out, and when I do, that’s when I leave.”

  “Which is when?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Franklin, I can’t do this this way. It’s not fair.”

  “Life ain’t fair. But I’ma tell you something. You gon’ be walking on eggshells around here until I do leave, ’cause with this stunt you just pulled today, I swear, I’d love to kick your ass one good time before I leave.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “What it sound like to you?”

  She went in the kitchen and started cooking. The phone rang, and she answered it. I freshened my drink. She kept on talking and talking and talking, just like I wasn’t there. I think I’m beginning to realize how you love somebody and hate ’em at the same time. The fuckin’ line is so thin. I heard her laughing and shit, while she fed Jeremiah. Finally, she hung up the phone and took him to the bathroom to give him his bath. She stepped over my feet and shit, like I was a piece of furniture.

  Right now, I swear to God, I could kill her.

  31

  When I got Jeremiah’s bottle out of the kitchen, I also got a butcher knife and slid it under my armpit. I did not say good night to Franklin. I walked back upstairs and tried to stop my knees from shaking. I didn’t know what he was thinking or what he might do to me. Jeremiah was already asleep when I went into his room, so I brought the bottle back into my room. Then I thought about it. If Jeremiah was in here with me, Franklin might be less likely to do anything to hurt me, so I put the knife under my pillow, brought Jeremiah back in here, and laid him down next to me. And then I waited.

  Franklin was playing all these old love songs—songs we used to make love to: Teena Marie’s “Portuguese Love” three times in a row; The Whispers; Al Jarreau, Stevie Wonder, and Jeffrey Osborne. I kept my eyes open for hours, just listening and remembering. I could not believe that we had arrived here. The man downstairs was not the same man I fell in love with. He was Jeremiah’s father, but not his Daddy. When did all this happen? And where was I?

  I heard the record scratch. He was changing them, and probably so drunk he didn’t even know he scratched it. Now it was Tina Turner he’d put on—“What’s Love Got to Do with It?”

  I lay there and cried, because I knew what it had to do with it. Everything. He must’ve played that record at least ten times in a row, and on full blast. I wanted to ask him to turn it down, but I wasn’t crazy.

  Then the music stopped.

  And that’s when my heart started pounding, because I knew he was probably on his way up here. I put my head under the pillow, my hand on the knife, and just lay there and waited for the door to open. But the next thing I knew, I felt a tiny hand wandering over my back, the weight of Jeremiah’s twenty-one-pound body following, and when I opened my eyes, daylight streamed through the window.

  “Good morning, pookah-pookah,” I said, and he grinned, looking just like his Daddy. I got up and took him downstairs, afraid of what I might find. Maybe he had decided to go ahead and leave. But before I reached the bottom step, I saw him on the floor, sprawled out like a big black whale on an island of album covers. The living room smelled like an old bar, and the bourbon bottle was empty. He coughed about ten times but didn’t wake up.

  I tiptoed around him and got Jeremiah ready for the baby-sitter. Instead of packing enough things for the day, I packed enough for several. I took him to Mary’s and told her the truth about what was happening between me and Franklin.

  “Jeremiah’s fine here. You go ahead and do what you gotta do, and don’t worry about this baby.”

  I went to a restaurant and phoned the school and told them I was sick. Then I called Portia and told her everything and asked if I could stay with her a day or two, until I could figure out what to do next. She told me to come on over.

  Her new place was beautiful. Her rent was paid and she was happy. I envied her. “Where’s the baby?” I asked.

  “With Arthur’s Mama. Girl, they love her to death, and come get her so I can have a few hours to myself.”

  “That’s good.”

  “So did this motherfucker hit you?”

  “No, but he told me he wanted to.”

  “So put him out, since he don’t wanna leave.”

  “How?”

  “Get a fucking restraining order. The police’ll make him leave.”

  “But his name is on the lease.”

  “That don’t mean shit. He ain’t paid no rent in centuries, and not only that but he’s threatened you, and you’re scared. That’s all they need to know.”

  “How long does the process take?”

  “Hell, hours of waiting, but are you scared to go back home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then stand in line. He ain’t the only motherfucker that’s fucked up, you know. You want some coffee?”

  “No. I should go now and get it over with.”

  “Damn, you gotta go all the way back to Brooklyn, you know. You know where the Family Court is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right in there.”

  After Portia left for school, I didn’t have the energy to go anywhere, so instead I watched soap operas all day—something I’ve never done. By the time Portia got home, President Reagan was holding a press conference on every network. Shit. I didn’t even vote. Arthur cooked dinner, and I tried to eat, but couldn’t. I finally just fell asleep on the couch.

  * * *

  In the morning, I took the subway to Brooklyn, and the ride felt like it lasted a week. By the time I got to court, it was five after nine. There were only two or three people in front of me. What was I going to say? It turned out that I told the truth. And it worked. They gave me the form and said that I had to get it served on him. But how was I going to do that?

  I sat in the waiting room for at least another half hour, just thinking. This was stupid, I thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I walked over to the phone booth and dialed. Franklin answered the phone.

  “Where you been?�
� he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “What you trying to prove, Zora?”

  “Franklin, you’ve scared me so bad that I can’t stay in the same house with you another day.”

  “Didn’t nobody tell you to bring no fuckin’ calendar of naked men in here, did they?”

  “I want you to leave today.”

  “Oh, so you telling me to leave, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  He started laughing.

  “I didn’t think we’d get to this point, Franklin, really I didn’t. I have loved you from the beginning, and you know it. I’ve tried to be understanding, tried to be supportive, but it doesn’t seem to have done any good. You’ve gotten hostile and angry and lazy, and I can’t take it.”

  “Spare me the sentimental bullshit, would you. I told you, I’ll leave when I’m good and ready.”

  “I’ve got a restraining order.”

  “You got a what?”

  “I’m at the courthouse now, and it’s in my hand. If you’re not out of there by tomorrow, the police’ll come and make you leave.”

  “You mean to tell me that you went to the white man to get me outta here? The fuckin’ white man? You bitches is all alike, I swear to God. You know what? I’m taking half of everything I paid for in here, and you wanna know something else? Fuck you and the white man.”

  He hung up.

  I took the train back to Portia’s, even though I was only ten minutes from Mary’s house and I wanted to see my baby. But I couldn’t chance it. Then I wondered if Franklin would go over there, so when I got to Portia’s, I called. Mary said she hadn’t heard anything from him, and if he came over she would just not let him in and would tell him that Jeremiah wasn’t there. I thanked her and felt relieved, in a way.