Trading Dreams at Midnight

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  “I uh, I uh,” Neena struggled with a response, thinking of how he’d prompted her to go to Nan’s as he’d played “Bridge over Troubled Waters” the other the night on the steps of the Hong Kong Restaurant in Chinatown. Thought of how she’d been unable to push herself up her grandmother’s block.

  “No need to say. You know, it’s cool, it’s cool,” he said as he closed his tin of lip balm and slipped it back into his mammoth coat pocket. “I was only wondering because when last we met our hero, she was going over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house she goes. No wolves, I hope, threatened our little lamb, little lamb who made thee, Dost thou know? Because the big bad wolf waits and waits and waits, nothing to do but sit and wait. He sits and waits.”

  He kept repeating himself then and Neena felt as if the lights had just been dimmed on the corner. She fervently did not want Bow Peep to be truly crazy in an incoherent way as she listened to him ramble on and build elaborate castles in the sand with his sentences that seemed as if they would hold until he’d add a thought and the whole idea collapsed into an indecipherable mound. Though she’d come to accept that her own mother was mentally ill, Freeda’s logic had always remained intact, at least in Neena’s view. Right now Bow Peep quoted the words to a Chaka Khan song about you reminding me of a friend of mine, and how seldom you find a face that’s so kind, moving on to Jon Lucien, as he half sang the part of that song about oh lady where you know me from, asking Neena if it could be before when the world was just begun. “Could you be my soul mate?” he sang, repeating it three times, then reached down for his flute and moistened his lips with his tongue and started playing that song. Neena listened until the end of the song. She took in the aromas from the plethora of restaurants around here: garlic and butter and grilling beef, the smells reminding her of her hunger. She could hear the drum of the subway underfoot; pigeons flapped overhead. A thin line of dejection started to move up from her toes because she’d had hopes. Hopes for what? That Bow Peep might be a help to her? The dinner smells were overwhelming and she thought how foolish to have such hope. She lowered her eyes to tell him good-bye and turned and began to walk away.

  He called out to her. “Neena,” he said, “Oh Neena,” stretching her name out, imitating Timmy calling for Lassie.

  Neena turned around and when she did he started to riff up and down the scale, his fingers going spastic as he blew out high and low notes. He leaned back and then he bent forward. He was making music, attracting an audience from among the heretofore oblivious foot traffic. People began dropping dollars into the faded green lining of his flute case. When he was finished, applause came. He didn’t acknowledge the applause, reached in his pocket and pulled out a swatch of fabric and started wiping his flute. The crowd soon dispersed, all except for Neena and an old woman with Kinte cloth wrapped around her head, a white cloud of puffy hair growing out of the center of the cloth. The woman wore a gray down-type jacket that was too small, a child’s jacket because she herself was a slight woman. The jacket hung open; a gray scarf crisscrossed her chest like an Ace bandage. “Power to the people,” the woman yelled to Bow Peep. “Blow baby, blow some more.”

  “All things in their time,” Bow Peep said.

  “The time is now; you better seize it while yet you still can,” she said, and Neena looked from Bow Peep to the woman and wondered if they were on the same medication. Watched as Bow Peep picked up the cash money that had been dropped into his flute case and pointed the money toward the woman. “For you, my lady,” he said.

  “I can’t take candy from a baby,” she said.

  “For gloves, please my lady, go buy your many selves some gloves.”

  “Well now, this little piggy did go the market,” she said, waving her little finger. It was bent, Neena could see, as if from osteoarthritis.

  “And it should never go alone,” Bow Peep said, pushing the money into the woman’s hands. “You know I’m right.”

  They volleyed back and forth like that, Neena fascinated that the one so easily followed the illogic of the other. The woman finally accepted the money. Neena had the thought then: this is how the pharmaceuticals would take over the world, through stealth-type drugs that dictated who could communicate with whom.

  Now Bow Peep looked at Neena, his long face pointed, serious. “That little number I just played was for you, my tiger, tiger burning bright. That was your healing vibe. My notes of scale shall set you free. It’s cool, baby. It’s cool.”

  Chapter 7

  NEENA TOOK THE long away back to her hotel. She stopped once again at the pay phone in the hotel lobby. Knew by now that Tish’s answering machine picked up on the fourth ring. Held her breath after the second when the ringing stopped. Damn. Not Tish though. Again, not Tish. Tish’s husband answered, Malik. Neena had never met Malik. Knew only that he was raised in Willingboro, New Jersey, and that he was a cameraman for the local news station where Tish was the noonday anchor. Neena remembered hearing about how they’d met in graduate school. She’d seen pictures, wedding pictures from a year ago. They’d gotten married in Hawaii, Tish had said, because they just knew too many people, wouldn’t be able to cut the guest list below five hundred. She remembered how ebullient Malik and Tish appeared in the picture as they cut their wedding cake. What a cutie you married, Neena had said in the note that went with the Waterford goblets she’d sent. She imagined his cute face now as he said hello, his light brownish eyes and light-colored skin and head full of throw-back nappy hair. Tish had said the wedding hair was a compromise; he usually wore corn rows.

  She fixed on a laminated parson’s table holding an artificial potted peace lily as she introduced herself to Malik, said she had spoken with Nan a couple of nights ago and she was calling again to check on how her sister was doing. “Is Tish there? May I speak to her, please?” she asked, trying to keep the desperation from her voice. She listened to his pause, how heavy it was.

  “Hey, yeah, Neena,” he said, and she could hear how hard he had to work to lift the pause, voice sounding like someone in the midst of weight training. “Yeah, it’s good to finally hear your voice, yeah, Tish talks about you nonstop.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “We’re praying, Neena. Yeah. Been running her back and forth to the hospital and she’s there now, you know in the hospital—”

  Neena sucked her breath in hard and quick as if her pinky finger had just been severed, grabbed her finger because it really did throb all the way up to her chest. “And what?” she said, when she could talk again. “I mean, their prognosis? You know, what are they saying?”

  “It’s like neutral at this point. The good news is that Tish should be okay. They’re trying to save the baby though, you know, trying to help her hold on to him for four more weeks. You know, it’ll still be touch and go, but they say if she can hold on to him for four more weeks he can be viable. So that’s basically where it is. We’re just trying to help her get there. You know every day he’s with her is like you know, I’m celebrating and praising God.”

  “Him. A boy?”

  “Yeah, a boy,” he said, and Neena heard his voice crack.

  “A boy.” Neena repeated it, felt dizzy from the sudden surge of emotion. “What hospital?” she asked. “Can she have visitors?” That heavy pause again. “Or at least phone calls?”

  “Yeah, like this so awkward, Neena,” he said, and Neena concentrated on the tweed couch in the hotel lobby; it was cream-colored and leaned to one side as if a heavy body sat there sleeping or already dead. She guessed another month at longest before the Queen Anne–style couch leg broke finally under the invisible weight. She’d rather play with that idea than listen to what Malik was saying; she could have finished his sentences for him but she allowed him to continue.

  “But yeah, you know your grandmother, Nan, I mean of course you know her, but she’s got it in her head that any kind of surprise is gonna force Tish into a labor that they won’t be able to stop. Anyhow, I’m not e
ntirely convinced, but you know, what do I know? And your grandmother’s citing all these midwifery type stats so I’m not trying to go up against all of that on the off chance that she could be right. So, I guess what I’m saying is that whatever I can do, I mean for you to be kept up with how Tish is doing, you know, just give me a number and I promise, you know, God, I feel like such a sellout doing this ’cause I know how much you mean to Tish. I know I’ma catch hell when she’s back in the black and has a healthy baby and hears that I got in the way of you seeing her. God, I’m just, you know, kinda scared, Neena.”

  His voice cracked again, wider this time. She couldn’t fault him for keeping Tish unreachable to her. Though she couldn’t console him right now either. “Listen, thanks for your time,” she said. “My sister married well, I’m glad for that. I’ll call again soon to check on how she’d doing.”

  “Well wait, Neena,” he said. “Do you want to leave a number? That way, as soon as there’s, you know, any change in her condition, I can call you.”

  “No thanks, really, I’ll be in touch,” she said as she started again to move the phone toward the base. Then she heard him calling her again to wait.

  “Uh, your grandmother said if I spoke to you to give you a message, she said—”

  Neena cut him off. “Tell my grandmother to go to hell.” She hung the phone then repeated it into the lobby air. “Go to hell, Nan,” she said over and over; “Nan, go to hell.” Said it even as she pulled the coffee-stained yellow pages from the ledge below the phone. Looked up the entries for hospitals. Didn’t realize how many there were in the area. She hated to waste her phone card minutes but she would call each one until she located Tish. Scanned the list and narrowed it down to the four most likely. She started with HUP. Her grandmother was brand loyal and had proclaimed more than once that should she ever become incapacitated, don’t take her anywhere except the University. Surely she would insist that’s where Tish should go. And Tish had always done whatever Nan suggested of her.

  Neena’s heartbeat stepped up as she was connected to patient information and gave them Tish’s name. Bingo. Tish was there. Her condition, please, she asked, her voice shaking. Fair. Thank Goodness, not critical or grave. Fair. Average. The phone number, please, yes, are you crazy, of course connect me, she almost shouted into the phone. And there it was. Tish’s voice in her ear just like that. Such a weak voice, as if she was eighty and had just had a triple bypass. Not a fair-sounding voice at all. Neena got the thought then that Tish might in fact be close to losing the baby, the thought wrapping itself around her larynx thwarting speech. “Hello,” Tish said again and Neena tried to pull up her own voice before it sank further into what was now a pit of quicksand filled with her second-guessings. Suppose Nan was right. Suppose the shock of hearing from her right now did in fact cause Tish’s uterus to contract and push the baby out too soon. She should have called more than a few times a year so that her voice on the other end of a phone line was part of the normal routine of Tish’s life. Should have called daily. “Hello, hello,” Tish said again. And Neena was picturing again what she imagined to be the guest room in Tish’s new home. The slant of the morning sun hitting the side wall the way it did in that childhood bedroom she and Tish had shared at Nan’s. Selfish of her to put Tish in jeopardy for the chance to soften her own situation. Should not be Tish’s emergency that she, Neena, had only two nights left in this fleabag hotel. Now there was another voice in her ear. Nan’s. Who is this please? Nan’s voice demanded and Neena tried to fix a rock in her stomach to anchor her to get the words out, to say to Nan, Happy now? She heard a click in her ear before she could utter a mumbling word. Then a silence fractured by her own hard breaths.

  Now she rifled through her purse looking for that lawyer’s card, the one who Bow Peep had introduced to her the night she arrived here. She’d told herself on the bus ride from Chicago that she was finished being a confidence woman, she’d even visualized herself sprinkling talc over that part of her life the way she would over a grease splatter on good silk to lift the stain so that even the heavier jagged outlines of the stain disappeared. But now she had to admit that even then she’d been holding the idea in a dark crevice of her brain of pulling in just one more man. Knew when she’d asked for the lawyer’s card that she had this very thing in mind. Just one last time she told herself now. Just to get enough money to legitimize herself for good. Then she could move to a place like North Carolina where the cost of living was cheaper than here, where she could buy a little town house on a new development and put up a swing set in the backyard for the children she was sure Tish would have. Allowed the idea of one more hustle to peek its head outside of the crevice, allowed the dingy light in this lobby to enlarge the idea even as her insides grew teeth and gnashed at the lining of her stomach. She pulled up the Jesus Loves You tracts and bunched them in her hand. Dug some more through her purse looking for the card, the nice heavyweight linen with raised lettering.

  Her heart was beating double-time as she talked herself in and out of calling him. The pencil image of the sad-eyed Jesus stared up at her from the brochure. “Do you know that he loves you?” the caption on the brochure read. She smoothed the edges of the tracts and placed them in a neat pile on top of the coffee-stained yellow pages phonebook. Remembered then that she’d taken the card out and slid it under the lamp on the particle board nightstand. She headed to her room to retrieve the card. She walked across the lobby and got into the elevator, a tight four-person-capacity crypt with faded red indoor/outdoor carpet for wall covering, a scuffed vinyl on the floor. She wouldn’t go for an outrageous amount from him. Just enough to start her new life in North Carolina. She was picturing already the boy-books and baseball mitts she’d buy for her nephew. She could return to school, she told herself. She could maybe combine an arts degree with psych courses and counsel black women living in shelters, maybe teach them how to bend wire for bracelets and earrings, how to glue chips of Austrian crystal, how to market the handmade jewelry to local retailers. Imagined the internal glow she’d get from helping the down-and-out women to positions of restored dignity.

  She imagined how her mother would smile. There it was, her mother’s smile. The power of its absence had hung over her and directed the course of her life as she’d moved to those places where she thought her mother might be. No indication of Freeda in North Carolina, though. She braced herself for the way the elevator rocked from side to side on ascent. Held her breath so she wouldn’t inhale the musty air as she walked the few steps to get to her room. Allowed her chest to open finally once she’d unlocked the door. The inside of the room smelled like her, like pink Dove soap and cocoa butter lotion and the VO5 conditioner that had dressed her hair since she was a child.

  Chapter 8

  CLIFF WAS THINKING about his wife, Lynne, when Neena called. He was sitting in his downtown law office where the ceilings were nine feet high but suddenly felt like those dropped ceilings in the basements of his youth with the recessed lighting and the brown stains from the shoddy plumbing. He’d partied hard in those basements back in the late sixties. A real lady’s choice back then with his oversized ’fro, and good weed in tow, and his acceptance to the Ivy League. But he was tall and the dropped ceilings were oppressive, like the faux wood that paneled those basement walls, the wall-to-wall carpeting in the smartly done upstairs portions of the house, the living room suites covered in custom vinyl to protect the likes of him, he guessed, the truly poor, from coming in contact with the upholstery fibers.

  He hadn’t been truly poor for decades, though. He and his wife lived in an old-wine part of the city where its age meant value, not decline. The homes were mansion-sized brick, though not garish displays, carved into stunning topography and set back amid specimen plantings from a century ago. The interior spaces were voluminous, rooms to get lost in. Though the basement had low ceilings because of the piping, so Cliff refused to finish the basement, determined that if they had children they’d party upstai
rs so that some teenage boy in the middle of a growth spurt wouldn’t have to suffer as he did. So far, though, there were no children; he and Lynne had been married for fifteen years so that it looked as if there would be none.

  The law office was empty when Neena’s call came through. It was after seven and that’s why Cliff had been thinking about Lynne, because of how late it was and he’d not heard from her all day. He was thinking that he should have heard from her several times by now. She should be a little melancholy since her Alzheimer’s-suffering mother was living with them now, she should need to cry on his shoulder or at least hear his voice during the course of her day. Then the phone rang and the caller ID flashed OUT OF AREA and he assumed it was Lynne since she was always losing, leaving, her cell phone somewhere and having to use a pay phone. He was irritated when he heard a voice other than Lynne’s; he would have let the call go into voice mail.

  “Who are you? We met where?” he asked, interrupting Neena, an edge to his voice.

  “On Filbert Street. Not far from the bus station,” she said. “Remember your friend was wearing sandals in the snow and you chided him.”

  He tried to picture Neena. He couldn’t, though he remembered the night. Remembered that at the point when Bow Peep introduced them, Cliff had been distracted by a woman across the street laughing very hard at something a man was saying in her ear. The woman’s laugh was that of someone thrilled to be alive because she was so in love with the man whispering in her ear. At first Cliff thought the woman was his wife, Lynne. It wasn’t Lynne and he was both relieved and disappointed.

  He remembered, too, feeling a sting in his own toes when he’d seen Bow Peep’s exposed feet. He and Bow Peep were closer than most brothers. They’d grown up next-door neighbors on a broken-down West Philly block back when broken-down blocks in West Philly were the exception. The kids on his block set apart as a result, ostracized by the parents who threw their children sweet sixteen parties in the finished basements. Though Cliff was given a pass because of his smarts and his charm and his looks, Bow Peep too because they were inseparable until Cliff went to college and Bow Peep to war. Cliff suffered a type of survivor’s guilt when Bow Peep returned with only a portion of his sanity intact. He became Bow Peep’s guardian of sorts. Bow Peep would insist that it was the other way around, that he’d been on the point in the jungles of ’Nam and to this day could sniff out danger after dark; he had Cliff’s back, he would say.