Trading Dreams at Midnight

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Trading Dreams at Midnight

  A Novel

  Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  For the sisters

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  IT HAD BEEN twenty years since Freeda spun in and…

  Chapter 2

  FREEDA APPEARED IN swatches after that, a phone call here,…

  Chapter 3

  NAN MOVED TO Philadelphia in an exodus north from Albany,…

  Chapter 4

  HAD NATHAN, THE blanched-colored man who’d just left Nan’s house…

  Chapter 5

  SO HERE NEENA was at the foot of Nan’s block…

  Chapter 6

  UNABLE TO FORCE her legs to move beyond the space…

  Chapter 7

  NEENA TOOK THE long away back to her hotel. She…

  Chapter 8

  CLIFF WAS THINKING about his wife, Lynne, when Neena called.

  Chapter 9

  NAN HAD FELT Neena’s presence through the phone line when…

  Chapter 10

  NAN KNEW ABOUT holding on to faith. Thought her faith…

  Chapter 11

  NEENA WORKED WITH her hair as she prepared to meet…

  Chapter 12

  THEY ENDED UP at Hugh’s Restaurant. UPSCALE, DOWN HOME was…

  Chapter 13

  A WEEK AND A half later and Neena asked herself…

  Chapter 14

  CLIFF AND NEENA ended up at a diner in New…

  Chapter 15

  NEENA WISHED THAT Cliff was more like Cade, linear, predictable,…

  Chapter 16

  BY THE TIME Neena had gotten to the part of…

  Chapter 17

  AN HOUR LATER it was still dark as Neena kissed…

  Chapter 18

  JUST AS WELL that Neena spent the next hour sipping…

  Chapter 19

  TISH WAS DREAMING about Freeda when the contractions began. It…

  Chapter 20

  TISH LOOKED AT Neena rushing straight for her bed and…

  About the Author

  Books by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  IT HAD BEEN twenty years since Freeda spun in and out of home the way that fabric did when it was unwound from those huge bolts all up and down along Fourth Street in South Philadelphia. A hot pink raw silk Freeda was when she was a happy girl, spreading herself out into a mesmerizing display with her thunderstorm hair and butter brown lips until her sadness hit and she’d scrunch herself up into a tight bland button and then poof, she was gone. That’s how Neena was known to describe Freeda’s comings and goings. Neena, Freeda’s oldest daughter.

  Freeda would leave Neena and her other child, Tish, with her mother, Nan, blowing kisses as she backed out the door promising to return in an hour that stretched into days and months. Nan, a small brick of a woman who didn’t play, threatened to turn Freeda in to child protective services and dared her to try to see the girls again. Though Freeda always saw them again. She would return ebullient, twirling like a spinning top, newly hired as an administrative assistant to some small-business owner who’d found her irresistible. She’d move the girls to a rented house and paint the walls pink because she said she needed the pink to stay happy. Neena, begging Freeda just to stay, for good this time, the happiness will come Mommy if you just stay.

  But Freeda never could stay. Certainly couldn’t stay twenty years ago that February night back in 1984 when a gray winter had passed out over Philadelphia like a fat drunk, thick and immovable. She was trying to stay until at least the winter sobered up enough to grunt and move over some and make way for a stream of yellow. She thought that if she could just stay until the spring she could stay for good. Especially in the house that she owned finally that her man-friend Wendell, an almost-divorced real estate/insurance broker had bought for her, paid cash in full at a sheriff ’s sale. A charming row house on a big street where they could tell the time of day by hearing what the traffic did; where in the summer the porch had a plump-cushioned glider and red four o’clocks filled the garden and bloomed on schedule and prettied up a summer night; in the winter Freeda baked coconut layer cakes from scratch and she and the girls passed afternoons at the living room window counting the colors in the prisms the mammoth icicles made, Freeda singing “Let It Be” as the warmth from the radiator pulsed against their corduroys sending a sweet steamy smell through the room.

  But by then Freeda was already trying to hold back the dark mood looming. When the girls were asleep and the whoosh of traffic outside was done, she’d sometimes lose herself for hours over the kitchen table cramming her mouth with Argo starch. She’d hold the starch in her mouth, then mash it into a paste until it inched down her throat thick like mud, or lima bean puree. Then the essence of the starch would drift to her brain in surges and she’d feel giddy, then drunk, then intensely focused, and then her sadness would back off enough for her to live like a halfway sane person lived: slicing mushrooms for Salisbury steak; ironing white cotton blouses for the girls to usher in when Nan corralled them to church; giggling with Wendell when he spent the night on the living room couch.

  Always too soon though, the starch quit on her, and the space inside her head would become the Academy of Music featuring Porgy & Bess and Sportin’ Life would commence to singing “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” And in between his declarations of seeing and believing, he told Freeda what to do. “Leave, Freeda, leave” was his usual sing-songy command. She always complied; the only way to shut down his voice was for her to comply. Not that middle of the night, though, in 1984. She couldn’t believe what he told her to do then. Told her to get the extra pillow from the top of the dining room closet and start with Neena because Neena would be easier than Tish; Tish would kick and scream; Tish would fight back. But Neena adored her so, trusted her, it would be lovely how gently fifteen-year-old Neena would succumb.

  Her whole body shook by the time she reached the black air of the dining room and opened the closet door. Neena herself had organized the closet so that the boots were lined in size order on the floor, the coats from light to heavy hanging on the thick steel pole, hats and scarves on the top shelf, and in the very back the extra bed pillow that Wendell used when he slept on the living room couch. She scattered the hats and scarves to get to the pillow, held the pillow between her hands and kneaded it to judge its thickness. She pressed the pillow to her as if it were her firstborn about to go down for a nap the way she’d pressed Neena to her when she was a baby, a tender desperation to the press as if to say if you die in your sleep know you were truly loved. Then she shouted, “No! I won’t,” as she threw the pillow across the dining room; the crystal pieces dangling from the chandelier made small crying sounds as the pillow whizzed by. She snatched a coat from the closet then. Put the coat over the starch-dusted paisley robe and covered her ears with her hands and ran through the living room on out the front door.

  Neena had been perplexed by the line of spilled starch that tracked from the kitchen table to the dining room closet on through the living room until it seemed to disintegrate into the braided welcome mat on the vestibule floor. She took it as a sign that Freeda would be directly back but on the third day she woke to her mother still gone.

  The absence was like a trough of cold air hanging over Freeda’s bed; Neena and eleven-year-old Tish had been sleeping in Freeda’s bed as if their combined scents rising off of their mother’s bed might pull her back home. The air was really cold because the heater had grunted and then died the day before so Neena woke worrying about how to get them heat. They’d not yet told Nan that Freeda
had disappeared again. Neena determined that they could make a go of it without Nan, convinced that’s what Freeda wanted. Why else had she left them here and not with Nan the way she usually did.

  Then Tish woke the way she’d fallen asleep, crying, insisting that she wanted to go back and live with Nan, she wanted Nan to take care of them again. Neena countering again the same way she had the night before, “We’re not babies anymore, Tish, we don’t need Nan to come flying in on her broom and carting us back to Kansas.” Kansas is how Neena referred to Nan’s middle-of-the-block row house on Delancey Street. She tried not to notice the puffs of smoke forming along the edges of her words as she pushed her point with Tish, the smoke mocking her point so she got completely out of the bed. To remain there, warm though it was under the covers, meant that she would be listening to Tish sob in wallows that went all the way to her bones.

  She went down into the kitchen trying to shrug off the chill bumps racing along her arms, stopped at the closet in the dining room to grab her pile-lined pigskin jacket, then into the kitchen to turn on the stove and the oven so at least the kitchen would be warm. As far as Neena was concerned Freeda had left good provisions: cabinets filled with canned soups and beans and tomato paste; Raisin Bran and Shredded Wheat; eggs and cheeses in the fridge; dried fruits; nuts. A vinyl purse in the top of her closet with several twenty-dollar bills, a knotted handkerchief in her underwear drawer with five crumpled tens. Freeda even had oil delivered the day before she left.

  Neena lit under the pot of water for their oatmeal, then went back upstairs and tossed the pigskin jacket on top of Tish as she instructed Tish to forget about a bath before school today. They’d wash up over the kitchen sink. “The kitchen will be nice and warm, Tish,” she said to the lump Tish made under the covers. She closed her ears to Tish’s whimpering, then went to look through the yellow pages for someone who could fix an old-fashioned oil heater.

  She avoided the display ads. If they had a display ad, she thought, they were probably white. She decided on a repair man named Jones. She used her breathy voice as she told him that she and her daughter were freezing, how quickly could he get there. He could be there in a half hour, he said. Meant they’d be late for school so she almost set it up for later that afternoon, but she knew Tish would go behind her back and call Nan if heat wasn’t soon to come.

  They washed themselves over the kitchen sink in silence. Neena laid out Tish’s school clothes over the backs of the kitchen chairs, Tish’s favorite red velour hoodie, a white turtleneck, cuffed Jordache jeans. Neena didn’t put on her school clothes though. She ran back up to Freeda’s room and stood at the dresser and lotioned herself down with Jergens. Then she covered her nakedness with a pink velvety robe given to her by Freeda when Freeda returned this last time. She made her face up then, lipstick and eyeliner and rouge so that she would appear a decade older than she was. Though she had a mature look anyhow with her naturally shadowed eyes that seemed to fall under their own weight, her mouth that was fleshy and full, her cheekbones that jutted in a way that made her look as if she was caught between a blush and a come-on. She’d had her womanly shape by the time she was twelve. “That chile built up from the ground,” people on her grandmother’s block where she was known used to say. She moved her fingers through her hair, pushing its thickness toward her face to hide the truth of her age.

  She fixed on Freeda’s pink boxed set of dusting powder and perfume resolute on the dresser. She dabbed the puff into the powder that smelled of talc and then stroked it down her cleavage. The puff was so soft against her skin, the softness painful, and she wrestled back cries.

  When Neena got back down to the kitchen, Tish was at the stove stirring around in the pot of oatmeal. Tish looked so vulnerable from the back, so small. Her braided hair hung over her shoulders and seemed to overwhelm her back with its thickness. Neena fought the impulse to go hug Tish. To hug her meant they’d be combining the abandonment that they each felt in drifts that came and went in manageable intervals. To hug her meant they’d both be overcome in a powerful gust of sadness that would knock them to the kitchen floor.

  “You’re my daughter when the heater man gets here,” Neena said to Tish’s back.

  “So what,” Tish said, as she turned and showed her face and Neena was able to shake the impulse to hug her. Tish had such a nice-girl face that was round and a mild-complexioned brown with wide eyes, a softly formed nose, and a cleft in her chin. They had different fathers. Freeda had been married to Tish’s father for a time, a respectable man who owned a hat shop in South Philly who’d bailed early on in the marriage when Freeda’s highs and lows asserted themselves. Neena never knew her own father. Though she had wondered over the years if she’d been conceived by one of the lowlifes who took advantage of Freeda during her deflated moods. Wondered if that’s why she was born looking twenty-one.

  Neena prayed that she looked even older than twenty-one that morning as she stood in the dark cellar next to the Jones heater-repair guy. She’d unscrewed the lightbulb and told him the light was out so their line of vision was limited to the swath of yellow oozing from his flashlight. She shivered as he threw the light at the heater and explained to her what the problem was, a bad starter. He handed her a written estimate of how much it would cost to get the heater humming again. She took the flashlight and pointed it at the estimate to keep her face in the dark. Eighty-five dollars, the estimate said. Was the heater even worth that. Neena focused on the PAID-IN-FULL ink stamp sitting upright in the top layer of the toolbox. She pictured the money she’d scavenged from her mother’s purses and coat pockets and dresser drawers. Enough to keep them in food and tokens until she could secure a part-time job, not enough to get them heat.

  “You kidding me.” She forced a half smile. “Eighty-five?”

  “Square business,” the heater man said. “And that’s only ’cause I know this model of heater. Lucky I do. This bad boy is a serious relic, got to be fifty years old.”

  She thought him to be in his early forties. Perhaps a looker in his youth but she guessed he’d worked on too many heaters because a crease ran the width of his forehead as if he was squinting to figure something out in the dark. Appeared clean at least, no black line under his fingernails that were illuminated by the flashlight.

  “I told my ex he shouldda made the previous owners convert to gas before he settled on this house,” she said, talking in fast whispers. “No offense, but you know you can’t tell a black man nothing.” She tugged at the belt of the pink velvety robe to show off her cleavage as she tilted the flashlight toward her chest. She let her mouth part slightly, her droopy eyes go even lower. “Though I bet you’re an exception.” She moved in closer and brushed his arm.

  “Well, try telling me something and let’s see if I’m the exception.” He was smiling, a moistening like dew forming at the corners of his mustache, the crease though still folded along his forehead as if it had been ironed and spray-starched there.

  “Damn, it’s just that, you know, eighty-five? I mean, can we work something out?” She breathed into the moldy cellar air. “I’m a single parent and all, you know.” She nudged the robe to part more. “My daughter will be leaving for school directly, mnh, good as you look—”

  He touched her face and his fingers smelled liked the refineries on a cloudy day. “Come ’ere girl,” he said. She tried to keep from gagging as she gently pulled his hand from her face and held on to his hand and said that she wanted to be good to him, but she needed heat first, it was too, too cold. She couldn’t go any further without the heat.

  A half smile was his response as he asked her to stand close to him and shine the light toward the heater. “I work faster when a fine chick is looking over my shoulder,” he said. Neena tightened as she watched him jam a stubborn bolt into a nut. She wondered then where they would do it. No furniture down there, they hadn’t lived there long enough to accumulate the old soft things that were stored in normal cellars. No couch with the fiberfill
peeking out, no wobbly coffee table, not even the bags of old clothes that most people pushed into the cellar until they would be given or thrown away. Just the moldy air down there and the chalk-colored walls that were concrete, rough and cold; she figured she’d just lean against the wall. No sense in prettying it, softening the situation and trying to make it something it was not.

  He was all over her when he finished with the heater, pulling at the robe and saying, Come on here girl with your fine self. She moved him toward the wall and tried to get into position, the quicker to get it over with. This would be her first time though she’d come close the year before when she was going in circles over Malcom, the sixteen-year-old boy who bagged groceries at the Pathmark not far from Nan’s. As the heater man bit at her neck and struggled to free his manhood from his pants, she remembered how Malcom had run behind her after he’d bagged her elbow macaroni and can of sockeye salmon, jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise and sweet pickled relish. “You forgot your receipt,” he’d said. “Never forget your receipt, Neena.” She realized then that she needed a receipt for the heater repair. She was paying after all. But he was to that breathless, hard-to-stop stage of things. She made herself go stiff with him then; pushed him hard. “Wait a minute, I need the thing first,” she said.

  “I don’t have no rubbers,” he said.

  “No, no, a receipt, I need a receipt, with your paid stamp on it. I need it or I can’t be good to you, baby. I need it now,” she said as she hurled the stream of light toward the toolbox.

  He cursed as he went to grab the estimate from the top of the toolbox. He pounded the receipt with his PAID stamp. He handed the receipt to her as he kicked off his shoe and pushed one leg completely from his pants. Neena folded the receipt and put it in her robe pocket. Her grandmother had insisted that the robe was hard luck when Neena had shown off the robe and danced around the house in it when her mother returned the last time. “Hate to imagine what your mother had to do to get that robe, to even hold on to that job with that married Wendell, and that house she’s moving you to. Unconscionable what she probably had to do,” Nan had said. The pocket of the robe felt so warm and safe as Neena dropped the receipt inside. Plus the furnace was singing to her in the background of the cellar and the steady spurts of heated air were building closer and closer to where she stood. She watched the heater man coming at her, dragging one pant leg behind him. She focused on the crease in his forehead as he squinted at the light going right for his eyes. She balled her fist inside the robe pocket and decided that she wasn’t doing anything with him.