Trading Dreams at Midnight

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  A pause, then, “Neena? Is this you, Neena?”

  “It is, yes, Nan? How are you, Nan?”

  “I’m doing, I’m doing. How are you is the question? Where are you? Are you in Philadelphia?”

  “Just passing through, just wanted to say hello to Tish,” Neena said imagining that Nan’s face was opening and closing with that look of irritated relief, relieved that Neena was alive, but irritated nonetheless to have Neena’s voice pushing in her ear.

  “Just passing through?” Nan asked. “Headed from where to where?”

  “I’m just, just headed to a meeting for my job, a conference.” Neena tried to keep a lift to her voice.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Neena?”

  A forest sprouted in Neena’s throat suddenly and blocked her reply of, yes I’m sure. She tried to push her voice through the thorny denseness, the thicket. She heard her grandmother calling her then from the other side of the trees, Nan’s voice fading in and out, an urgent voice her grandmother used that snapped the end from Neena’s name and sounded like a sharp breath. She cleared her throat. “I’m here, yes, Nan. I’m all right. I’m fine.”

  “You sure? You gonna stop past so somebody can get a look at you and see for themselves if you’re all right?”

  “It’s—you know, if there’s time, there’s this meeting thing—I really wanted Tish’s new address—”

  “You not lying, are you?”

  “About wanting Tish’s address—”

  “About some meeting—”

  “God, Nan, why do you always have to assume the worst about me?”

  “Well, you will lie. Am I right? Your mother would run off but she—”

  “God, Nan, please! I didn’t call—God, I called for Tish. May I speak to my sister, please.”

  “Well, now, Neena, if you kept in touch the way you belong to do, you’d know your sister’s not well. In the hospital. Threatening to miscarry—”

  “Threatening to miscarry?” The panic-driven spike in Neena’s voice drew the Ritz-Carlton doorman’s attention as he turned from helping a couple into the back of a cab and hunched his shoulder and motioned his hands to Neena in a yo what’s up with my phone kind of way. Neena signaled to him with a raised finger just a minute, then asked Nan what hospital.

  “Not a good idea to tell you that, Neena—”

  “What are you saying, Nan—”

  “Not the best thing for Tish to be shocked by your presence all of a sudden, too hard on her in her delicate condition, she’s got enough to do to try to hold on to the baby.”

  “I can’t believe you’re saying this to me—”

  “I can’t believe you wouldn’t have thought it already, if you thought about more than yourself sometimes and your own devilish desires—”

  Neena pressed the phone off. Walked it back over to the doorman and just nodded because she couldn’t talk. He wasn’t trying to talk anyhow as he dropped the phone in his pocket and opened the door to the town car that had just pulled up. Her feet were weighted suddenly as she stood on the corner thinking about what to do. She tried to slow her breathing. Tried not to feel anything right now because anything she felt would be too imprecise, too muddled to call by a name the way a psychiatrist she’d been with said was necessary to do. Give what you’re feeling a name, he’d insisted, and then the emotion will be manageable. She started down the alphabet: afraid, blue, conflicted, deflated, effaced, fucked, was that an emotion? How about gored? Hope, she hoped with everything in her that Tish would hold on to the baby. Stuck at H now, Hate. She hated Nan. Blamed Nan for the way her mother would disappear. Abandoned the alphabet but at least her breathing was coming under control.

  She started walking. Turned onto Market Street and tried to console herself with the fact that although she had no arranged place to sleep tonight, at least she’d made it here during a nighttime snow so that the city was more a silhouette; its hardness shadowed in muted outlines forming a picture pretty enough to be in a storybook. She looked up on City Hall under a coating of snow, imagined the clop, clop of horse-drawn carriages. Walked now through City Hall courtyard. Now she felt trapped in a gothic tragedy the way shadows were falling overpowering the snow. She curled her toes in her boots to keep them back from where the cold moisture seeped in as she walked closely behind a woman carrying a bag from Miss Tootsie’s gourmet soul food. The woman talking on a cell phone saying that dinner was lovely, and oh what nice portions, and she was bringing home a doggie bag good for a whole ’nother meal. Neena followed the woman down the steps to the el—often found herself following random women who looked to be about the age her mother would be, fantasizing that it was, that she’d call out “Mommy!” and Freeda would turn around and turn on that beatific smile and say Hi doll, how’s my doll baby. The fantasy scrambling like a bad cable signal when the women turned around, like this woman was doing now, warily at first, relaxing when she saw it was Neena behind her and not some purse-snatching thug, Neena having the thought that given her dire situation she could become just that, or worse. Become a she-wolf waiting for the moon to rise.

  She walked the length of the platform. The el that would take her to she had no idea where was coming like a silver bullet kicking up the urine-scented air down here. She got on the el. She tried to settle into the train’s clackity motion. Looked around the el to distract herself. The assemblage of commuters dotting the seats made up an international brew that surprised Neena: Asian, African, Middle Eastern, probably a few Latinos that she guessed she was taking for black. A police woman leaned against the pole, the gun in her holster expanding her hips to plus-size. She was saying something about Fifty-second Street to an old cat in a leather Sixers bomber. Neena got an image of Fifty-second Street then, remembered when it was a bustling retail strip by day, a partygoer’s paradise by night. The devil’s trap, her grandmother called it. “You go down there on a Friday or Saturday after dark,” Nan used to say, “and the devil gonna have you in his clutches, have you doing his bidding until the day you die and you join him to burn up in hell for all eternity.”

  Neena knew Nan was just trying to scare them; it had worked with Tish. Smiled now remembering how Tish wouldn’t venture onto Fifty-second Street even during the day when it was dense with normal people banking at Provident National or buying lemon pound cake from the Cookie Jar, a Baldwin novel from Hakim’s. Neena, though, walked the strip regularly in the aftermaths of her mother’s perennial disappearances, trying to find her from among the women propped on bar stools laughing with too much fervor. Her mother’s bottomed-out moods always sending her down here to grovel with people she would barely acknowledge when she was up. When she was up she’d socialize with respectable men who’d take Freeda and the girls to wholesome places like the Franklin Institute where they’d walk through the giant-sized heart. Neena’s mother telling her that whenever Neena crossed her mind, which was a thousand times a day, her heart would feel as large as the one they tiptoed through at Franklin Institute.

  Suddenly Neena wanted to be on Fifty-second Street as the el pulled into the station. She got up abruptly and slid through the doors just before they closed, and walked down the steps from the platform onto a desolate stomped-to-the-ground corner that was so far from her memory of the area that she just stood there at first, gasping, feeling as if she’d just stepped across the rotting threshold into an abandoned house. Wondered how much worse it would look without the softening effects of the snow. Developers obviously hadn’t refound this part of West Philly yet, hadn’t sent the explorers, the pioneers, in to resettle the way she’d heard they were starting to do even along Ridge Avenue in North Philly. She breathed through her mouth because the corner smelled like mold. A fried chicken place across the street did little to erase the smell, but at least it sent up a cracked swath of light and she could see beyond the steel-grated building of what had been a booming Woolworth’s, up the street to a broken neon sign with only the apostrophe lit. The orange-red apostrop
he soaked up the snowflakes as soon as they landed and seemed to say something possesses me, just don’t ask what. The idea of the broken sign fit so with what the area had become that Neena walked up the street and on inside.

  Neighborhood bars were generally not her preference and this one appeared to have outlived its usefulness. It was warm in here at least. The light, though, was as shallow as what she’d left on the outside save circles of sky blue that bounced around an old-fashioned jukebox right now playing Otis Redding. A rail-thin bartender seemed half asleep when she walked up to the bar and asked if there was a pay phone she could use. He motioned to the back of the bar and she dug in her purse for a quarter to occupy herself so she wouldn’t appear to be looking around the bar, even though she was looking around the bar. Picked out the man wearing a burgundy cable-knit sweater as the one most likely to hit on her. Would have to be him, he appeared to be the only man with any life moving through him from among the three or so other unattached men in here who seemed zombied out at tables barely illuminated by candles so small they weren’t even threatening to the plastic red carnations sprouting from shot glasses.

  She was at the back of the bar now, her hand finally on that near-extinct specimen, a pay phone. She dialed her sister’s number hoping for Tish’s husband, prepared to hang up the phone should Nan answer again. Then there it was, Tish’s voice in prerecorded form saying, “This is the day the Lord hath made, I rejoice, am so glad that you called.” Neena swayed from the sound of her sister’s voice melting in her ear. Imagined Tish with a rounded stomach, Tish with her God-loving disposition, her sunny compliance to whatever the rules were, her petite cuteness that never garnered the type of attention from men that Neena’s appearance had. Tish pregnant. Thought back to when Tish had told her. It was in the fall, Neena remembered, because Tish was rushing off to a Halloween party sponsored by her sorority for children living in a homeless shelter. Only nice costumes, Tish had stressed. Fairy godmothers and angels and puppy-dog type costumes. “They’ve seen enough monsters in their young lives,” Tish had said, and then started to cry. Tish was always easy to cry. So unlike Neena who rarely did. Neena didn’t leave a message. She called information to try to extract her sister’s address, had tried also before she boarded the bus in Chicago. Got the same response now, a private listing. She waited for an operator to try to convince the live voice that since she knew the phone number, she should be privy to the address. To no avail.

  She swallowed the desperation trying to edge up her throat as she walked to the bar and took a seat. Counted to ten. By the time she got to nine there he was talking in her ear, the man in the burgundy cable-knit sweater. “Hey lady,” he said. She exhaled softly, wishing for a mint against the roof of her mouth to overpower the smell in here of bad whiskey and overwrought cologne. “My name is Ramsey,” he continued, “and I don’t mean to intrude if you just want to sit here and be with yourself, but I just gotta say that you are the finest thing that’s walked through that door in all the years I been coming in here, and I been coming in here a lotta, lotta years. What’s your name, doll face?”

  She angled slightly the swiveling bar stool so she could see him. He had a dark mouth, and a neatly trimmed mustache, a broad nose and chin, wide shoulders. A wedding band, of course. He leaned in closer and she could see the blazing white shirt collar atop his sweater. The collar line was pressed and clean and she hoped the shirt had been laundered at the cleaners and not at the hands of some hardworking wife doing double time. When her mother had had an ongoing relationship with the married man Wendell, Neena had been hyper for it to end. Though Neena had always been able to reconcile her own time with a married man.

  “Doll Face,” she said then to his shirt collar.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said, ‘What’s your name, Doll Face,’ and I’m telling you my name. It’s Doll Face.” She focused on his mouth, the way it took its time pulling back to a full-throttle grin. He had long, straight teeth, too white to be his own.

  “Oh, you a kidder, huh,” he said on a laugh. “Well, I like to play.”

  “No, no. For real,” she said. “That’s really my name. My last name is Face. My daddy named me Doll. I have a sister named Sweet and one named Baby and my brother’s name is Bold.”

  His lower lip folded and unfolded itself several times as if that’s where his brain was, as if his lip was charged with determining whether or not she was just messing with him. His lip deciding to go with it, she could tell, as his tongue quickly wiped away the residue of thought and he was smiling again. “What you drinking tonight, Doll Face? Whatever your pleasure, I’m here to make it happen.”

  “I’ll just have ginger ale.”

  “That’s all, nothing stronger?” he asked, disappointment hanging on the end of the question as he made hand motions to the stick figure tending the bar. “You don’t drink?”

  “I do.” She played with her fingers. “I’m just going through a thing right about now and I need to feel what I’m feeling.”

  “Might help a pretty lady to tell a stranger all about it? Care to join me at my table?”

  He extended his hand and she looked at him under-eyed, feigning shyness.

  “I swear I don’t bite,” he said and she hesitated and counted three beats in her head and then allowed him to help her down from the bar stool. She followed him to a table in the back of the room. Red miniature lights framed a heart-shaped wreath on the wall behind his head and made it look as if he had donkey ears. Wondered then if that was a sign that he was a jackass. She suppressed the sudden need to laugh at the thought as she unbuttoned her coat and slid her arms out, unzipped the ankle boots, and lifted her feet back so they could dry. She could feel him staring at her, trying to get her to look at his eyes. She refused. Folded her hands on the table instead and furled and unfurled her fingers. He grabbed her pinky finger and squeezed it and she looked at his wedding band, a thick solid gold; her eyes then traced the hair on his hand to his watch, a black-face Movado.

  “You from ’round here?” he asked.

  She shook her head, no. “Georgia,” she said.

  “Oooh, a southern girl, they grow them pretty down there. I been there plenty of times. Atlanta. The Big Peach. Had me some hot times in hotlanta.”

  She looked up beyond his head to the wall and those red lights again shaped like donkey ears that fit his head so exactly. Even when he turned to acknowledge the bartender as he set their drinks down, the lights seemed to turn with him. She tried to think of the sound a donkey made, a hee-haw sound. That was a mistake because everything he said now resembled that sound. Now she was going to laugh. She bit her lip. Felt so mean to sit up here and laugh at the man. He was raising his glass in a toast. “Here’s to Georgia,” he said, though she heard hee-haw and she couldn’t hold it in. She covered her face with her hands and the laugh caught in her throat and came out like sobs. He squeezed in the chair next to hers. His arm wrapping all around her shoulder telling her to let it out, might help to tell ole Ramsey all about it, if he was anything, he was a good listener.

  She manufactured tears, then let them slide melodramatically down her face. Sipped her ginger ale and put a tremble to her faux southern accent as she told him that she was sad and lonely. Her husband had just left her for her best friend and she felt incapable of trusting another human being ever.

  “You can trust me. Baby, I’m for real,” he said. As if on cue the Dells crooned from the juke box, “Stay in My Corner,” the longest slow-drag song on the planet if you were caught dancing with the wrong person. “Come on, doll face, I think they’re playing our song,” he said as Neena sniffed hard and yielded to his pull on her elbow. He sang in her ear as they danced just a foot away from the table. She closed her eyes as he held her tightly and gently at the same time. She felt nothing.

  Ramsey whispered to her in that man-about-to-burst-begging voice that they needed a more private corner for her to stay in. Asked her then if she would like to g
o for a ride over the Ben Franklin Bridge? He’d just gotten an E-ZPass and had nowhere he needed to be for the rest of the night. Didn’t have the confines of a day job either because he’d gotten a generous early-out deal when the naval shipyard closed down in the nineties.

  Neena interrupted him to ask about the wedding band.

  “Oh that,” he said, “means nothing,” going on to explain that he was in the midst of separating from his wife.

  She assumed that he was lying though she couldn’t tell for sure because she never looked in his eyes. Didn’t look in his eyes now as they sat again at the table and he talked about his two grown daughters. His voice went soft and innocent when he told her how much his daughters looked like his mother. She figured he wouldn’t be rough or violent as he asked again if she’d like to help him christen his E-ZPass.

  She kept her eyes on the table, rubbed her finger around his wedding band. “On one condition,” she said.

  “Name it,” he said, and she heard the excitement in his voice shaping his words so that they sounded like gunshots.

  “I have a weak stomach in a car,” she said. “And those God-awful stick shifts are the worse. I do declare you’ll be stopping every other block for me to lean out the car if you drive a stick shift. So if you don’t drive a stick, I do believe I’m inclined to go for a little ride.”

  He laughed with an open mouth as he frantically dug his hands in his pocket and pulled up a slim wad of cash and pushed two fives down on the table. “I drives a Ford Tempo, baby. And my ride is as smooth or as hard as you want it to be.” He helped her with her coat, then ran his fingers through her hair all the way to her scalp and said that he loved her hair, he hadn’t seen hair like that since he’d marched with Angela Davis in Montgomery.