“That’s your grandmother, Donovan, but you know I don’t want you to share anything with me that has rolled out of that woman’s mouth.”
Daisy’s feathers were ruffled, and her milky complexion went beet red.
Donovan swallowed and began again: “What I meant to say was that I’m going to fill out some applications with the city. Maybe get on at the post office—”
Daisy bristled.
Donovan looked at Elaine before glancing down at the floor. “Or transit. Maybe.”
Daisy stood up and smoothed her track pants. “Okay, okay. You’ve made a decision. You have a plan. I can respect that.”
Donovan felt his body relax.
“We can respect that,” Elaine mimicked.
* * *
There were delivery jobs, a few months of unloading boxes midnight to eight at the local Pathmark. A one-year stint driving for a Trailways bus line, and then transit finally called.
He started out as a token booth clerk. He didn’t mind it too much. He met interesting people, saw bizarre things, and had plenty of time to sit and think. From there he moved to conductor and finally motorman.
He liked being a motorman most of all. Enjoyed barreling through the narrow dark tunnels and the solitary silence of his booth.
Clyde hardly ever found him there beneath the city streets, and on the rare occasion he did, his voice got trampled beneath the rolling steel wheels of the train.
THEM
1999–2000
DECEMBER
I remember that girl,” they said. “Her mother wore long red beads around her neck, wrapped her head up in colorful scarves, used the same scarves as skirts, smoked weed, and burned scented candles. Men came and went. Came and went.
“The lovebirds? Did you ever see them? They were always huddled together; one move and so did the other. I guess that’s why they call them lovebirds, huh?
“She let them go after Pat, her daughter, stepped off the platform at Utica Avenue.
“No more love, she was heard to say, and stopped wearing her hair tied up. Kept the beads, though, but let the birds go.
“Kept the gold-and-white cage too, but not her mind.
“You can see her off of Canal Street and Leonard; she’s pushing a shopping cart. Can’t miss her, gold-and-white birdcage and red beads.”
* * *
The first collage Campbell pieced together began with that story. A sharp and painful memory that would never seem to wane or pale. It spilled from her in tears and kept her up at night, clutching her heart and rocking at the edge of her bed.
She thought she was dying, slipping away with every short breath she took. Some days her heart raced in her chest, and other times it didn’t seem to want to beat at all. There were night sweats, weight loss, and dizziness. She was sure she was dying.
“You’re not dying,” Dr. Bing sighed, and shook his head.
Campbell was seated on the examining table, her legs dangling beneath her as she stared at the doctor’s humped back.
“All of your tests came back fine.” He kept his back to her as he scribbled notes down in her file. “You’re just anxious, that’s all.”
“What?” Campbell spoke for the first time since she’d disrobed and climbed onto the table. “What did you say?”
Dr. Bing turned around, and Campbell had to resist the urge to laugh. His pale green eyes looked as large as eggs behind his bifocals.
Dr. Bing scratched at his full beard and considered Campbell for a moment before walking toward her. “You have an acute anxiety condition.”
She looked down at her feet. She needed a pedicure. She curled her toes. “What exactly does that mean?” she asked without looking up.
Dr. Bing sighed and reached over and pulled the chair from beneath his desk and sat down. He folded his hands and looked earnestly at her. “What are you worried about?”
Campbell winced at his question. She wasn’t worried about just one thing. There were hundreds of things. No, millions of things she worried about. But most of all she worried about dying empty, the way Pat had.
* * *
Campbell had been there when it happened.
They’d had dinner that night, all five of them. The select few that had made it out of Brookline Projects and made good.
Anita, stout but beautiful, had graduated high school with honors and received a scholarship to Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, where she took culinary courses, married, opened a bed and breakfast, divorced and took her share of the monies made during that ten-year marriage, came back to New York, and opened a restaurant.
Laverna had joined the army and had spent eight years of doing who knew what, but when she finally came back home, she was gay, but told them she had always been that way. She said her attraction to men had just been a phase.
Porsche had married her childhood sweetheart. A skinny boy named Clark who played a mean game of jacks and could jump double Dutch better than any one of them.
Campbell and Pat had been the closest of the five. They had the most in common. Both were good students, but Pat made straight As while Campbell made Bs.
Pat’s mother, Alverna, had been some sort of bohemian. At least that’s what Millie referred to her as. Her husband Chuck was killed in action while serving in Vietnam, and now the government would send her a check for the rest of her life, as long as she never remarried.
She’d lock herself in the bathroom three times a day to smoke a joint. She said she needed to do that because she missed her husband and smoking reefer took her to another plane, one that allowed her to communicate with her dead husband.
“Daddy said to tell you hello,” she would say as she backed out of the bathroom, spraying Lysol with one hand and fanning the last wisps of smoke away with the other.
Alverna said that Chuck was her soul mate and that she’d never love another man as long as she lived. She’d fuck them, though, she said, because women had needs.
She believed in stuff like that—astrology, tarot cards, aliens—things that made the girls giggle and spin their index fingers near their temples when Alverna wasn’t looking.
When Pat and Campbell graduated from junior high school, Alverna had given them gold pendants of penguins as gifts. “Penguins mate for life,” she said, and smiled. “I hope one day the two of you will be lucky enough to find your soul mates like I did,” Alverna said as a whimsical look blanketed her face.
The girls had just nodded and thanked her before walking away, believing more than ever that Alverna had a few screws loose.
Pat had made a decision that she was going to do it—have sex with Darryl Pennington from 258 Stanley Avenue. She told all of them that she’d popped one of her mother’s birth control pills and was cutting school the next day in order to do it.
Anita had been the first one of them to lose her virginity. It had been a painful ordeal with her cousin’s boyfriend. Porsche and Clark had spoken about it, but Porsche was too afraid of her mother finding out and then putting her out on the street.
Campbell had already done it and was embarrassed to admit that she hadn’t had sense enough to steal birth control pills or even ask Trevor if he had a rubber. So she lied and told the girls that they had used a rubber and that yeah, yeah, it had felt good.
The one birth control pill Pat had popped hadn’t been enough to ward off Darryl’s fifteen-year-old sperm, and the same held true for Campbell’s imaginary condom—and they’d both discovered they were pregnant just as their third year of high school began.
Pat had given birth to a son and named him Tye. Campbell, a girl named Macon.
Now, years later, they had come together again as they had so many times in the past when one of their own was celebrating or suffering.
There were dark circles under her eyes, and Pat, already petite, had dropped two whole dress sizes in thirty days.
Anita shared a worried look with Campbell. Laverna and Porsche couldn’t contain their surprise at Pat�
�s condition; it marched all across their faces.
They spoke about small things, breaking bread and chipping away at the ice with trivial conversation that no one was really interested in while Pat just nodded and looked through them.
Anita drained her wineglass and gave her friends a look that told her she’d had enough and placed her hand on top of Pat’s and said, “Baby, what is going on with you?”
Of course, Anita knew what was going on. All of them knew. Campbell had shared it with each and every one of them. She had to; Pat wouldn’t take any of their calls.
Pat smiled sadly. “Nothing. Really,” she whispered, and already the tears had begun to well up in her eyes.
Laverna and Porsche sighed and shook their heads miserably.
“Pat,” Anita cooed, and squeezed her hand. “Pat, baby, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
Campbell, Laverna, and Porsche sounded agreement and nodded their heads.
“It hurt everywhere and only stops hurting when I hold my breath,” Pat blubbered. “I wish I could hold my breath forever.”
Nearby diners looked on, and one woman even dabbed the corner of her eyes. Campbell felt her chest heave. Porsche took a deep cleansing breath, and Laverna looked away and cleared her throat.
Hadn’t they all been there? Not just hurt by a man, not their hearts simply broken, but bludgeoned?
Somehow the He ain’t worth it. He did you a favor, and You deserve better just didn’t seem appropriate this time around.
Anita pulled Pat to her, holding her close while her body quaked with sobs. All four of them had taken turns hugging her, telling her that they loved her and always would. Reminding her that it would be okay . . . maybe not today or even fifty days from then, but that it would, one day.
“Sorry,” Pat apologized the four blocks they walked to the train station.
Anita had told them they could stay overnight at her Upper East Side apartment, but both Pat and Campbell had declined. Laverna had driven into the city, but she was living in Parkchester, and even though she said she would drive them back to Brooklyn, Campbell thought that was putting her too far out of her way and would not hear of it.
Porsche had a place in Chelsea, just four blocks from the restaurant. She hugged Pat extra hard and told her she would call her the next day and that she’d better answer the phone. She kissed her quickly on the cheek before hugging Campbell and shooting out across the avenue just as the traffic light went from green to red.
They’d decided to take the train.
It was late, and there were only four or five other people on the platform. Every breath, utterance, or shuffling of feet echoed around them and made the cold night seem even more bitter.
There were plenty of empty seats, but Pat chose to sit next to a little boy and his mother. Campbell shrugged her shoulders and slid into an empty seat across from them.
Pat smiled down at the little boy. “Don’t he remind you of Tye when he was that age?” she asked Campbell without looking at her.
Campbell considered the little boy. He did resemble Tye a bit. “Yeah, he does.”
“Tye is almost a man. He’s with his father now more than he is with me,” she said, her eyes swinging between the little boy and Campbell. “If I went away . . . he would be okay without me now.” She reached out and stroked the little boy’s hand.
The mother smiled a little nervously and pulled her son closer to her side.
“What are you talking about?” Campbell said, leaning forward and giving the woman a reassuring smile.
“I feel so empty,” Pat answered.
Campbell made a face. “What?”
“Nothing,” Pat sighed and slumped back against the seat.
The train roared through the tunnels, and Campbell slipped in and out of sleep, her eyes rolling open every so often and falling on Pat’s troubled face.
When they stepped off the train at Utica Avenue, the December wind had found its way down into the tunnel, and outside a light snow had started to fall.
Two A trains came and went, and Campbell and Pat had not spoken a word to each other.
Fifteen minutes passed, and Campbell balanced herself along the yellow line at the edge of the platform and leaned over to peer down the dimly lit subway tunnel.
A train was coming, but not on that track. “Dammit, another A train,” Campbell complained under her breath, and turned to suggest to her friend that they brave the cold instead, but Pat was gone.
Campbell’s head swung left and then right, and there was Pat, walking down the platform, head down, hands stuffed deep into her pockets.
“Pat!” Campbell called to her. “I think there’s a problem with the local,” she said, and started across the platform. “Let’s try to get a cab.”
It was, Campbell would remember, like a movie in slow motion.
The front of the train coming around the bend, one headlight out and the other bright and white. The sound of the wheels screeching as they hugged the tracks, the tired look on the motorman’s face and the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
The slow turn of Pat’s head and the jerky awkward movement the body makes when the mind has made a sudden decision.
She stepped right off the platform, right in front of the train.
The shock of it all made Campbell laugh, because there was Pat, arms and legs spread wide like wings, plastered against the front of the train like a cartoon character, before her body flew off and was crushed beneath the iron wheels.
The train squealed and then came to a stop, and Campbell thought that it was odd that the train still sounded as if the motorman was riding the brakes, odd that the doors were open and people were getting off and giving her peculiar stares and still the screeching continued, odd she thought until she was up and out on the street, trying hard to get away from that sound and finally realizing that the sound was coming from her.
Campbell had taken Pat’s suicide hard. She and the rest of their friends, Anita, Laverna, and Porsche, had held each other and wept over the closed casket that held Pat’s body.
For days Campbell kept forgetting she was gone, picking up the telephone to call Pat to share some piece of good news or gossip.
Everything suddenly seemed too complicated, too cramped.
Campbell spent a week cleaning out closets, lining and rearranging drawers, while Macon and Millie watched but stayed out of her way, allowing her grief to work its way through her.
When she finally took a moment to look at herself in the mirror, she saw the dark circles under her eyes, the mess of hair on her head. She would have to do something about that woman looking back at her; she would have to make some changes there too.
Campbell left early one morning and came back home with her hair in a mass of twists that looked like worms to Millie.
“What is that?” Millie asked, pointing at Campbell’s head.
“Locks. Dreadlocks.”
“Oh,” Millie sounded. “Like the Jamaicans wear?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” Millie sounded again. “You going to be one of those Rasta people now?”
“No.”
“It looks great, Mom,” Macon said, jumping to her mother’s defense.
Millie merely shrugged her shoulders. She hoped it was just a phase.
* * *
Dr. Bing waited for Campbell to answer.
“Yes, I guess I’m worried about a lot of things. My daughter, my family—” She stopped to take a breath and then continued with a little laugh: “The state of the world.”
Dr. Bing did not laugh with her, but nodded his head thoughtfully. “I’m going to prescribe some Paxil for you,” he said, and reached behind himself to grab a prescription pad off his desk. “It’ll help you rest and, well—” he paused to scribble down the dosage, “not be so anxious.”
Campbell chewed on her lips and looked around the room.
Dr. Bing ripped the prescription from the pad and held it out to her. “If you
like, I can refer you to a—”
Campbell’s body went rigid as she predicted the next word to roll off his mouth.
“Psychologist.”
Campbell swallowed.
“Are you involved in any activities?” Dr. Bing pulled at his beard and looked down at the floor as he thought about his next set of words. “Uhm, clubs, associations . . . church?”
No, no, and no again, Campbell thought to herself. It was just work and home most days. She shook her head.
“Well, you need to involve yourself in something, something time-consuming and distracting.”
Campbell nodded her head.
“I’m going to write down the name and number of the psychologist.” He began scribbling on the prescription pad again. “Just in case what I’m prescribing and suggesting doesn’t work.”
* * *
Belly dancing class with Macon, the department softball team, knitting. She’d tried those things and dozens more. The pills were helping some, she did manage to get five hours of sleep instead of the usual two, and the night sweats had stopped. But during the day, the pills made her feel lethargic and dull minded.
The idea came to her while she was writing in her journal. As a child, she’d always enjoyed making collages, had loved the smell of the glue and the sense the scattered pictures came together to create.
The collage had come together in bits and pieces of color and black-and-white images from magazines and newspapers. Images that represented who Pat had been and the person she’d hoped to become.
It had started slowly, a ruby-colored heart fractured at its center. Large brown eyes brimming with tears, a mother holding her son, a white picket fence, calla lilies, a hope chest, doves.
Campbell worked at it feverishly without knowing exactly what it was she was doing, not even aware that the grief was draining away from her, the constant fear subsiding.
Millie saw it happening, and so did Macon—and they’d both breathed a sigh of relief and thanked the Lord that that particular storm was finally passing.
When the collage was done, Campbell’s fingertips crusted and white with glue, she stood back to examine what she’d put together.
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