Trading Dreams at Midnight

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  “We can get to me after hours. Right now we’ve got to give our child a name. How do you like Alfreeda. Please say you like Alfreeda.”

  “But your insulin, Alfred—” Then she stopped. “Alfreeda,” she said slowly, considering the name. “It has a certain ring, I must say, Alfred, it does.” She lay back against the pillows and allowed the idea of the name to settle.

  Then Alfred began to sing to the tune of Maria, “Alfreeda, we’ve just had a child named Alfreeda”; he walked back and forth the length of the beds as he sang, endearing the other mothers to him with the grand affection he was expressing for his newborn baby girl. He was back at Nan’s bed telling Nan that just the thought of his name attached to something as pure as the infant would seal the fact that he was a changed man, a better man.

  And he did try. The day he brought Nan and the baby home from the hospital and the yellow cab pulled up in front of their South Philly apartment, Alfred leaned in and told the driver to keep going. “Keep going some more, my man, I’ll tell you when to turn,” he said as they went beyond Twenty-third Street, crossed the river, then beyond Thirtieth, beyond the University of Penn, and the grand castles of West Philadelphia, at least that’s how Nan had always characterized them. By the time they passed West Philadelphia High School for Boys and Girls, Nan assumed that they were going to Sam’s store. Sam and Goldie must have prepared a surprise welcome home luncheon, Nan knew. Then Alfred whispered in the cabdriver’s ear and instead of turning right they turned left. Then left again and through a block that looked as if it was lifted from a storybook with its leafed-out trees and whitewashed concrete sidewalks, and lush hedges newly sheared.

  Alfred hopped from the cab and helped Nan out, Nan holding the baby close. He walked her to the foot of the steps, then held her elbow and guided her to the porch. “Ring the bell, Nan,” he said as he hopped back down to the curb.

  “Ring the bell? Who lives here, Alfred?” she asked, but Alfred was too preoccupied counting out money to pay the fare so Nan walked across the broom-swept porch and rang the doorbell. Her hands shook and she pulled the baby even closer. Then looked through the blinds and saw Goldie and Sam walk into the vestibule and her heart dropped. Foolish of her to think that this was her house, that Alfred could even pull off such a feat without her assistance. This was the house Sam had bought for Goldie and himself. She fixed her face to smile, kissed her newborn’s forehead reminding herself that the pleasure she held in her arms was worth ten thousand houses, and she was happy for Goldie, she loved Goldie like a sister, she reminded herself too.

  “Congratulations, Goldie,” she said as the door opened and Goldie took the baby from Nan’s arms, Goldie cooing and welling up at the sight of the child, saying, Look, Sam, look, you ever seen something as beautiful as this?

  Nan moved beyond them into the wide-open living room with the buffed-up hardwood floors and as if to confirm it for Nan, there was Goldie’s couch, the gold brocade that Nan had helped her pick out last month. Nan was so large with Freeda in her womb that she was unusually short-tempered with Goldie that day at the furniture store as Goldie went back and forth between two or three models asking Nan over and over, Which one you favor, Nan, huh? You got good taste. Which upholstery will give me better wear, huh? You know fabrics.

  Now Nan had to sit on the couch. She was exhausted. Of all the childbirth side effects she’d been primed on, nobody told her how plain tired she’d be. She sat on the couch. Almost wanted to put her feet up on the coffee table. The coffee table familiar, the brown and white tile shaped in a diamond that was at the center of the table. Her coffee table this was. The end tables and lamps hers too. And there over the mantel, the picture of Jesus ascending. Her picture, her house, her dream come true as she listened to Sam and Goldie still in the vestibule making bright exclamations over Alfreeda, then watched Alfred walking toward her. His chest as wide as the double-wide window centered on the living room wall. She told herself then to hold on to this moment, she would need this moment, would need to return to it time and again because happiness like this couldn’t last, wasn’t supposed to last. If it lasted, she told herself then, how would she know that she had faith?

  Those early years were good during Alfred’s sober times. Alfred and Freeda adored each other and he was always looking for a reason to parade her down the street, swinging her hand in his, both beaming when people stopped them. Oh how cute, the admirers would say. Oh look, what a perfect daddy’s girl. And she was. From infancy on she lit up whenever Alfred was near. Goldie would tease Nan that she needed to have another child that was for her, because that baby girl is all Alfred’s. Though Nan didn’t mind. She enjoyed that father and daughter adored each other so. Encouraged it, in fact. Noticed that Alfred didn’t even want the streets as much after Freeda was born.

  One brilliant Saturday morning Alfred lumbered home sooner than usual after walking Freeda to the dance studio where she took ballet. Nan had been cleaning grout from the back splash over the kitchen sink. Had thought she’d timed it to how long it generally took him to walk the five blocks to the Fancy Feet studio and back. Didn’t like for him to catch her cleaning. Goldie had cautioned her to never let her man catch her in the act of cleaning. Too domesticated a thing and a man’s nature resists domestication. “Better you let the house go than look like a wife,” she’d say. “The average man prefers a sweetheart to a wife.” She hid her hands behind her back as she peeled off the rubber gloves she wore, then pulled the drawer open behind her and dropped the gloves in, the gloves still wet with ammonia. Then turned to wash her hands, trying also to disperse the smell hanging over the kitchen. Asked Alfred then what did he do? Fly back?

  “She’s too sad, Nan, not normal. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “What are you talking about?” Nan asked as she went to the refrigerator and pulled out their Saturday afternoon snack. Deviled eggs and sardines, saltine crackers on the side. She set down two napkins, plates and glasses, poured lemonade into the glasses. Alfred pulled her chair back so she could sit, then he sat, sighed. Bowed his head while Nan said Grace. Reached for her hand then.

  “All I’m saying is that we might be in for a rough landing.” He pulled her hand to his lips and kissed her hand and Nan hoped her hand didn’t smell of ammonia. “We been fortunate to fly this high for this long.” He continued talking while Nan served their plates. “I have anyhow, never thought life could be as good as the one you’ve made for me. But the air’s holding trouble ahead, Nan. I hate to say, but it is. Freeda’s too sad for a well-loved, cared-for eight-year-old child.”

  “What’s got you talking like this, Alfred? Did Freeda have another one of her crying spells, normal thing for a child, especially a little girl.”

  “She didn’t cry, but she did put words to her feelings as we walked past the fire station and I pointed out the pole that the firemen slide down. And she said sometimes she slides down a pole just like that but then she can’t get back up. And I asked her to describe what she was talking about. And she said sometimes she’s pulled down to the bottom inside of herself and she’s stuck even though she doesn’t want to be there. And I asked her what’s pulling her down like that and she said a strong wind that has hands and eyes, big rough hands and Doberman pinscher eyes.” Alfred’s voice caught in his throat and he swallowed hard. “And so I asked her what it was like down there, and she said it feels like how the Reverend Mister describes where Satan lives. No joy allowed.”

  “Now, Alfred. The chile’s got an overactive imagination, always has.” Nan stuffed an egg into her mouth. She then arranged a sardine on a cracker just to do something with her hands, her hands wanting to shake. And she couldn’t let Alfred see her hands shake, couldn’t let her concern show, her concern might push Alfred’s worry to proportions that he couldn’t handle with a sober mind. Might start him drinking again and so far this time he’d gone for close to four years.

  She’d become accustomed to protecting him from potential life
blows. When she herself had had a cancer scare that turned out to be just a fibroid, she’d not even hinted it to Alfred for fear of arousing his taste buds for Jack Daniel’s, or Southern Comfort, overproof rum. She never complained of a headache, or toothache, stomach sickness, agitation; worried that in order to take away her complaint, he’d first have to bolster himself with his own liquid panacea. And though Goldie had suggested that she was going about it all wrong, what’s the sense in having a partner if you’re still dancing alone, she’d say, Nan didn’t want to take the chance that in her weakness, Alfred would himself become weaker still. So she held her hands from shaking.

  Though she may as well have let her shaking hands show anyhow. May as well have allowed her entire self to go into convulsions because a few months later Alfred started drinking again anyhow. Nan couldn’t say for sure if it was his worry about Freeda, had never been able to say for sure what the spark was that ignited his desire for drink. Though he did rein himself in the following month, for good, he swore. This time for good. For good that time lasted eight weeks, six months; once he went another entire four years without a drink and their sober life was idyllic, filled with a clean house and thick center-cut meats and the sounds of Freeda’s laughter when Freeda was a happy girl. But inevitably Alfred would return to chasing down a meal with a beer and then chasing the beer down with rye. Nan would threaten to put him out, then she’d put him out, then she’d go find him and drag him back home. She’d pat him down with a cool cloth, help him roll into bed. She’d pour strong black coffee down his throat come morning so that he could go to work.

  To his credit he remained a hard worker, brought most of his paycheck home. He was never violent or excessively argumentative with Nan. Didn’t run around with other women that she knew of. He’d cry and sing “’Round Midnight” and then pass out. Nan convinced herself he was the best possible of drunks, told herself that if this was the worst storm life was sending her way, she could weather it.

  Except that she couldn’t. Came to that realization one Sunday morning, a decade and a half into the stop-start-this-time swear-it’s-for-good-never-could cycle. Nan got up early and took a longer than usual bath. Took extra time with her appearance that morning too. Combed her hair out in looser curls, put on eye shadow, and lipstick and rouge. She’d had the thought from time to time that if she’d been a prettier woman; if she’d been smarter; if she’d been more charming; if she’d been wittier, stronger, weaker, sexier; if she could dance, sing, play pinochle, play the harpsichord, the ponies; if she’d been anyone other than who she was: Nan, the well-raised southern girl with the beautiful mouth though otherwise unremarkable looks who could create old-time-religion-type transformations with a needle and thread and some fabric to cut, then she could have turned Alfred’s lusting from the direction of those bottomless shot glasses and made him lust only for what was righteous, thought herself righteous.

  Sat Alfred down that Sunday morning. Really sat down beside him on the porch where he’d landed the night before trying to get to his keys; his urine glistened as it trailed down the steps and seeped into the garden where pink begonias were on display. “Do you think you even have it in you to stop? Are you even able, Alfred?” she asked.

  Alfred looked at Nan and in his mind she was smiling. She was all dolled up with lipstick and rouge, her hair out, her voice like honey with a hint of a rasp that made his manhood stir. He smiled back at Nan. “Hey there, gorgeous.”

  “Do you even want to? Alfred. Whether or not you’re able, do you even want to stop?”

  He thought he’d never heard Nan use such a nonjudgmental tone. The nonjudgment in her tone snipping through the layers of his inebriation. He cried and shook his head back and forth, “No, No, I don’t have it in me to stop,” he said. “I can’t, I can’t, Lord knows I can’t. And I want to, Nan. I want to, for you, for Freeda. But I can’t. I don’t have it in me to stop.”

  Nan took his head against her chest and rocked him like a toy boy-doll. She could smell bacon sizzling all up and down the block. Could detect too that unmistakable aroma of raw chicken parts dressed in flour and paprika going into the army-sized skillets in the church kitchen across the street. She should be over there right now helping to prepare for the dinners to be served between the morning and afternoon services. She should be shaping her pretty mouth in the special smile she reserved for Mr. Edwards, the Sunday school superintendent.

  A robust middle-age man with a balding head who’d lost his wife a year ago, Mr. Edwards hadn’t sent the earth to moving under Nan’s feet when she looked at him the way that the earth had shifted when she’d first seen Alfred, but there was a burp in the air that seemed to hint of possibilities. Mr. Edwards would hold on to her hand longer than most when he greeted her; of late he’d even started leaning in to give her a polite peck on the cheek, allowing his lips to linger as he whispered, Good morning my dear sister Nan. She’d not done anything to provoke the attention that actually made her feel less weighted on the inside, smiling on the inside. She’d not batted her eyes, not twisted her hips when she walked past him, not smirked her mouth in a come-on smile. And most especially, she’d not mixed her sweat in a brown-bottled concoction to persuade his attention, because that act all those years ago in that South Philly bar that smelled of chitterlings and whores’ perfume still plagued her.

  Alfred had fallen back asleep against her chest, had slobbered all over her dress, and she realized she’d have to change it. Realized something else as she sat on the porch floor rocking him. She’d have to let him go. And if he came back to her it couldn’t be on staggered legs. Never was that she wasn’t enough of all those things she’d tell herself she wasn’t enough of each time he went down into the mineshaft of drunkenness. The list expanding the longer he remained down there. What she really wasn’t was God. Realized then that nothing short of God would cure Alfred. She cradled his head and rehearsed how she’d say it. She’d tell him that she just couldn’t go on with him like this. She didn’t have it in her. And since by his own admission he knew how that felt not to have something in you, something that you were desperate to have in you but it wasn’t within your power to put it there, he should be able to read her heart, and hold no malice against her for snipping the cord that had bound them.

  Alfred was snoring against her chest and she rubbed the softness of his hair. She thought about how she’d explain it to Freeda. Goldie had asked if Freeda would like to spend the week on Coney Island with her and Sam, and Nan thought now would be a perfect time. She kissed Alfred’s forehead and he smiled in his sleep. She thought she’d change into the black and white sateen dress to wear to church today, the one with the dropped waist that gave the illusion of curves to her hips.

  Alfred moved back to South Philadelphia and Freeda, who’d always been a daddy’s girl, shuttled back and forth between the two. She didn’t take one parent’s side over the other, though if she had her leanings, it would have been toward her father. She had huge love, affection, and respect for her mother, but she was devoted to Alfred because she understood his compulsion to drink. She thought that, like her, he had a dark bottomed-out place inside of him that tried to hold him mired but the drink allowed him to float back to the top. Saw his drunkenness as his attempts at being happy, at being good. In Freeda’s eyes, his goodness always showed through.

  By then Freeda was a pom-pom-shaking high school cheerleader for the West Philly Speed Boys; secretary of the Young People’s Choir at her Baptist church; Saturday shampoo-girl at Miss T’s Beauty Salon on Sixtieth Street. Except for Freeda’s tendency toward happy-sad swings on her emotional pendulum, she seemed none the worse after the snap in her parents’ union.

  A year into the separation something solid inside of Freeda that had held her together at the core, even with her high-low moods, began to break down. She was seventeen and her menstrual cycle became erratic and she was afraid she was pregnant though she hadn’t actually had sex by then. Her junior prom date had com
e on her clothes, a sky blue satin gown hand-sewn by Nan. And Nan had been preaching to Freeda since she was old enough to understand that a man’s essence could in fact travel through cotton or nylon, or silk, or polyester, even wool, to get inside of a woman because that was the nature of a man’s essence, that was its God-intended purpose, to get inside of a woman to plant the seed that would blossom into a baby. She was so sure that the prom date’s essence had meandered on through the satin that she began swallowing Humphreys 11 pills by the handful because the girls on the cheerleaders’ squad said that would bring on a miscarriage. She was relieved when she started cramping the next week and realized that she wasn’t pregnant. Though she was also sad because she didn’t know for sure whether or not she had been, whether or not she’d disrupted a life trying to form.

  It was also about this time that she began eating starch by the boxful. She’d been introduced to starch when she was just eight years old by Lou, the wild-looking woman who rented the third floor of Sam and Goldie’s triplex. Lou would sit on the stairwell licking mounds of starch from her palm and the sight of her fascinated Freeda. Freeda would drift out into the hallway as Goldie and Sam and her parents laughed and talked around the kitchen table while Sam prepared a gourmet meal. Freeda would pretend to be counting the banister spokes on the stair rail, or the bouquets of purple and blue pansies on the wallpaper as she stared at the woman with her explosive hair uncombed, her feet always bare, until one day she worked up the nerve to talk to her.

  “What you eating, Miss Lou?” she asked.

  “Starch, girl.”

  “Why?”

  “Got acid in my stomach.”

  “Me too.”

  She laughed. “You too young to know what I’m talking ’bout.”