Trading Dreams at Midnight

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Though Neena told herself that Tish was the only reason she stayed, she also stayed for Freeda. Stayed on the long odds that Freeda would return like she had once on Neena’s sixteenth birthday. Stayed so she’d be there to greet Freeda, to tend to her if she needed looking after because surely no soft welcome would come from Nan or Tish. Stayed and endured Nan’s chastisements that came at her like rocket fire: Why you always swaying back and forth like you calling to a man? Nan would say when Neena rocked herself to settle herself down. I know you not keeping company with some married man, she’d say if Neena smiled a hello to the men on the block. Where you going with that hot-in-the-behind look plastered to your face? she’d ask every other time Neena headed for the door. Neena so relieved when she walked down in Mr. Cook’s basement corner store.

  Neena double-tied her apron and took up her spot behind the counter to help Mr. Cook prep for the forty or more hoagies he’d make tonight. It was a Friday and all but the die-hard southerners relinquished activity in their own kitchens on Friday nights, opting to send their children down here to pick up hoagies and cheese steaks, quart-sized bottles of Frank’s orange soda that they’d enjoy in front of the television as they laughed at Steve Urkel saying, “Did I do that?”

  Neena had just finished slicing tomatoes and was moving on to sweet pickles when she looked up and saw Joan’s husband, Ted, smiling at her, the one her grandmother had been accusing her of even back when Neena was infatuated over Richmond. “Your boss tell you I was looking for you earlier, Neena?” he asked, his smile wider than it needed to be.

  “He did, yeah,” she said, concentrating on the pickle.

  She’d gotten an earful about him from Mr. Cook. “Watch out for that old Ted, Neena,” Mr. Cook had said. “Watch out for any old married man who knows something about everything that has to do with something a young pretty girl like you needs to know. You could be talking about the man in the moon, Neena, and suddenly either Ted worked on the moon, or got a buddy who worked on the moon, or he knows whoever is hiring on the moon, or he can tell you the composition of the moon. Let me mention the man in the moon, or let eighty-year-old Hettie mention the man in the moon, or three-hundred-pound Vera, let even his own wife mention the man in the moon, suddenly he don’t even know for sure if the man in the moon exists. He’s full of his own droppings, he is.”

  Neena already knew this about Ted. For some time now she’d been aware of his gaze like so many groping hands as he stood on his porch and watched her walk. She had exaggerated the sway of her hips once or twice. Didn’t know why. To get back at Nan, maybe.

  “Yeah, well what I stopped to tell you about, Neena” Ted said, “is that I’ve got a buddy in Cleveland.”

  “Mnnmh,” Neena said, smiling up at him, thinking about how she’d tell Mr. Cook that Ted’s buddies didn’t end on the moon, they were in Cleveland too.

  “Yeah, Neena, so my buddy Ralph was telling me about this woman whose acquaintance he’d just made. Said she’s from here, grew up on Delancey. So I said I must know her, or if not her, least I must know her people. Sure enough, you not gonna believe what her name is, Neena. Name is Freeda.”

  Neena let out a small shriek. She’d just moved her thumb back before Ted mouthed her mother’s name. Would have otherwise lost the tip of her thumb in the crush of pickles, though it was such a close call she wasn’t sure she had not.

  Mr. Cook called from the other end of the counter. “You all right, Neena?”

  Neena took a deep breath and held up both her hands and wiggled her fingers. “Still got ten, Mr. C.,” she said forcing a laugh.

  “Be careful, how ’bout it. And anyhow, Ted, don’t be distracting my people while they’re using knives,” Mr. Cook said, no play to his tone as he looked from Neena to Ted.

  Neena scooped the pickles from the cutting board into a container and set it next to the one overflowing with sliced tomato. Her heart was beating both inside and outside of her chest at the mention of Freeda, that someone was claiming to have recently seen her mother in the flesh. Felt displaced suddenly, as if she had climbed out of her body; felt here and not here, part of her already halfway to Cleveland.

  “I’m sorry, Neena.” Ted took his voice down, leaned his head in, and Neena watched his mouth move to read his lips, his mouth dark and full. “I’m real sorry just springing that info on you like that. But, you know, I mean, I mentioned my buddy running across your mother to Joanie and she said whatever I do, don’t tell your grandmother, said no one with any sense breathes Freeda’s name in Nan’s presence, so I figured I’d mention it to you.”

  “No problem,” she said. “I’m glad you did. Unlike Nan, I can generally handle hearing my mother’s name.”

  “I figured as much.” He was smiling again. “And I thought, you know, maybe I could relate the details of what he told me, you know, not here though.” He cleared his throat.

  “Yeah, the details. I’d very much like the details.” She breathed more than spoke, her words came out in whispered gasps. She felt tingly, as if she was about to go into chills, or break out into a sweat, her body unable to decide which. She was afraid. Afraid to hear about mother, afraid that her mother was in that flattened state, her life force slow-leaking out of her in a steady stream of sadness. Though she couldn’t not hear about her, couldn’t pass up the opportunity to know exactly where she was, to tangle with the idea of getting to her, wherever, however, she was.

  “I’d tell you to ring the bell on your way in tonight but Joanie is out for the night at one of her sorority gigs so that wouldn’t look too cool, you know, you coming past when she’s not home.”

  “For sure.”

  “There is this sweet little tavern on North Broad where I go sometimes called the Rum and Coconut, though you’re not twenty-one yet—”

  “Been passing for years,” Neena said. She had in truth sat on bar stools in Fifty-second Street clubs where she’d gone looking for Freeda in the aftermath of Freeda’s last surfacing in Philadelphia. After hearing the nighttime click of Nan’s bedroom door and watching Tish’s ritual of saying her prayers and kissing all of her stuffed animals good night, Neena would dress herself to be older than she was, then creep through the night into red-air places where the men offered to buy her drinks. She’d tell them she was looking for her cousin, she’d show them Freeda’s picture and ask if they recognized her, said that her aunt was sick over her only daughter’s disappearance and she was doing what all she could to find her. “She’s on that stuff,” she’d say. Though to her knowledge Freeda wasn’t on anything except for the massive mood swings. The men would swivel their chairs around to face Neena. They’d be willing to help her find her cousin, they’d say as they pressed their knees against her. She could see, though, that they were useless to her as she’d decline their offers of car rides to this or that neighborhood. This one though, Ted, was different.

  At thirty-eight Ted was twice Neena’s age, his hairline already pulling back, strands of gray mixing in with his meticulously shaped goatee, his face hinting at the places where wrinkles would form. Nice strong-featured face, mild brown complexion set off by the orange and red T-shirt he wore. JAMAICA NO PROBLEM blazed across the front, like his desire for Neena was blazing too, so uncovered, the muscles in his face so slackened that Neena was embarrassed for him, wanted to throw him a towel so he could cover some of his desire for her. She looked away from his face. Focused on the thick gold chain he wore almost hidden under the T-shirt, then on the developed muscles bursting beneath the cap sleeves as if his arms were already flexed, already around her.

  “So when will you be there? At the Rum and Coconut?” she asked as she wiped a dishcloth along the cutting board, rubbing hard into the wood at the spot where she’d almost lost her thumb.

  “’Round eleven.” He said it more as a question than a statement.

  Neena looked straight at him then. The severity of her dark eyes caught him off guard and he coughed. “I hope you’re not making me wa
ste my bus tokens,” she said. She folded the dishcloth into a perfect square. Was about to move on to dicing onions but now Mr. Cook was standing over her.

  “I need you on the register, baby girl,” he said. “Mrs. C. feels a headache coming on like she does every Friday about this time. Maybe Ted is up to cutting onions since he seems to like that spot where he’s standing, and I ain’t yet heard him order a sandwich to go.”

  “Yo, Cook, ease up,” Ted said and Neena felt the tingling sensation recede from the surface of her skin. Recognized that the tingling had not just been fear about Freeda’s condition, but that she’d just been aroused by Ted. She was surprised that the likes of a Ted could affect her so. Although she was glad that she was aware. As long as she was aware of her desires, she reasoned, she could control them. Unlike Freeda who never could control her desires, who’d go dreamy-eyed time and again over man after man with whom she’d have no future. Now Neena felt the arousal drain down to the soles of her feet. Felt like a little girl again with Mr. Cook standing next to her. Pretended for the moment that Mr. Cook was her father as she laughed at what he’d just said.

  The Rum and Coconut was a tavern-type place during the week where people sipped mixed drinks and listened to rhythm and blues falling from the ceiling speakers. Conversations could be carried on in whispers without interruption unless the waitress stopped by to point out the fried wing, or hot roast beef, or peeled shrimp specials listed on the free-standing laminated menus. On Friday, though, the night Neena met Ted here, the tavern became an old-school party spot billed as an after-work set for the mature professional. Women in control-top hose and push-up bras and the men who’d like to relieve them of the same crammed the circular dance floor and shed the workweek skins as they moved to Earth, Wind & Fire singing “Got to Get You into My Life.” Neena and Ted squeezed into a table against the mirrored wall; they were both wearing black, both their black shirts unbuttoned showing the neckline jewelry they wore: Ted with the thick gold link chain, Neena with a heart-shaped pendant given to her by Tish as a consolation for the ring Neena lost that Nan had presented to Neena on her sixteenth birthday. Ted reached in and fingered the heart and mouthed “nice” because they otherwise had to shout to be heard. Neena nodded. She got a surge from his finger against her throat, like she’d gotten a surge when she’d walked up the subway steps into the sudden flash of Broad Street neon and there Ted was on the corner, a worry line etched up his forehead as he leaned in to light a cigarette. She thought either that he was worried that she wouldn’t show, or worried that his match wouldn’t catch; it didn’t matter to her really which it was, it was more the intensity of the expression that gave her the surge, his face set, so molded.

  She leaned in and fingered his chain and he jerked, surprised by the move. She relaxed into the move as she took her time running her fingers across the gold links, then tracing a U along his collarbone and enjoying the feel of his pulse beneath her fingers, his pulse speeding up the harder she pressed. She used to do that same thing to Richmond. She hadn’t seen Richmond since last summer. He hadn’t come to Philadelphia this summer because he’d gotten a summer job in Atlanta where he’d gone to school. Neena had told him that he should take advantage of every opportunity to be happy, even if it meant loving someone else. “It’s not like we go together anyhow,” she’d insisted, though she herself hadn’t been with anyone else.

  The music slowed from the Earth, Wind & Fire tune to Michael Jackson crooning “Oooh Chile.” Neena looked at Ted and raised her eyebrows, used her eyebrows to ask him to dance. He cleared his throat and coughed and then took her hand and helped her up to standing.

  “What y’all drinking?” the waitress shouted just as they freed themselves from between the table and the mirrored wall. Ted pointed to the bar indicating they’d order there, their seats quickly taken up by a pair of women with big frosted hair.

  Ted was a polite dancer; their bodies barely touched as they swayed to the beat. He sang some of the song in her ear; he had a nice voice, though he couldn’t hold a note for long, his breaths coming too quickly, Neena could tell. Now she whispered in his ear. “The joint is jumping in here. I was expecting a quiet little bar set.”

  “It is, usually, you know quiet. I apologize, you know, I’d forgotten how this place changes up on a Friday.”

  “Well don’t think you getting out of telling me about Freeda.”

  “Never, of course not. You think we need to find a quieter spot?”

  “Actually I can hear you just fine long as you talking directly in my ear.”

  “Not a problem then. I’ll talk directly in your ear. I guess we just have to keep dancing. Guess I’ma have to hold you a little closer too. You know how long I been waiting to hold on to you, girl?”

  “No. How long you been waiting? Tell me. While you telling me about Freeda. Tell me how long you been waiting to do this.”

  He let out an involuntary moan and pulled Neena closer in. “My buddy, yeah, he works for a private social service entity in Cleveland that runs community living arrangements. He prescreens the prospective residents, yeah, and that’s how he’d come to be acquainted with Freeda.” Ted leaned his forehead against Neena’s, then fingered her chin. “I knew for sure that he was talking about your mother when he described her eyes. Said she had wild dark eyes. Mnh, you got some eyes, you know that, Neena. On the one hand they can scare the mess out of a brother; on the other hand, damn, they turn me on. You turn me on, Neena.”

  A fast song was playing now and Ted still held Neena in a slow-drag pose. They were jostled by the hips and arms flapping and swaying, the intermittent shouts of “Party” getting in between their conversation, threatening to disrupt their conversation altogether. Neena wrapped both her arms around Ted’s neck. Like she’d been surprised down in Mr. Cook’s store when she’d first recognized a desire for Ted, she was surprised right now at how aroused she was, her arousal moving from the nape of her neck like a slow hot hand down her back. Her arousal felt dangerous right now because there was no Mr. Cook standing over her to call her baby girl and return her to innocence. The sense of danger mingled with the fear about her mother, what she was about to hear, needing to hear it, dreading it too.

  Ted had Neena’s face in his hands. His fingers traced the outline of her lips. He kissed her right where they stood on the dance floor. She thought it a bold move. He led her then from the dance floor crowded with bodies in various stages of getting it on. Led her right to the front door of the club. The door was glass and fogged over; fingerprints at a variety of heights looked like decoration. Ted added his own large prints as he pushed the door open and Neena stepped first into the night.

  It was three o’clock in the morning when Neena walked up on Nan’s darkened porch. She could see through the slice of opening between the drapery panels that the living room lights were turned on. Unusual for the lights to be on since Nan turned the downstairs lights off by ten most nights. The living room had in fact been black when Neena had tiptoed through on her way to meet Ted. She wasn’t entirely surprised by the lights. She’d had a feeling that she’d return to lights. Sirens in fact would not have been a complete surprise. She had after all lived out her grandmother’s prophecies tonight. She’d been a hot-in-the-behind heifer, the kind of girl doing ugly that God didn’t like. Took down a married man like the Jezebel that she was. In the process Ted promised to call his buddy and get answers to Neena’s dozens of questions about Freeda because he’d drawn blanks on the specifics. Didn’t even know for sure if Freeda had even been accepted as a resident in the community living program, didn’t know how functional she was, where she’d been the past three years, how she’d been living, was she on medication.

  She turned her key in the front door and walked into the vestibule. Both couch lamps she could see now were turned on to their highest brightness. Company-type lighting. She wasn’t completely surprised to see the lights, nor was she entirely stunned when she stepped into the brightness of
the living room to feel her grandmother’s hand hard against her mouth, though her grandmother hadn’t hit her since that evening after Neena had been with Richmond for the first time. Her lip was blossoming as she stood there, spilling blood, and she cupped her hand to catch the blood and caught the sight of Joan, Ted’s wife, tall and dark and slender like an African model with her close-cut curly ’fro. Pretty woman. Neena didn’t have anything against Joan. She was able to stand there catching the blood dripping from her mouth and look right at Joan without shirking, though she’d just been with her husband. She didn’t want Joan’s husband. She’d enjoyed his sturdiness and how weak he’d gone. Enjoyed how he’d brought her to a silvery place. But she had no future aspirations that included Ted; she was no threat to Joan. She was searching for the proper way to say that but she was more concerned with her lip. Plus now Joan was coming at her with her fists balled. “Got to nerve to look at me all calm,” she said, her voice catching in her throat and she sounded as if she was choking. “I got to get two separate phone calls from my best friends telling me what they saw at the Rum and the Coconut tonight. I got to hear them describe him and describe you and you gonna look at me all calm. I’m gonna kick your natural ass, you dirty little whore.”

  Nan got in front of Joan. “I’ll deal with Neena,” Nan said. “You best get back down the block and see to your husband. He’s surely not blameless. He’s more wrong than Neena if you want to know the truth of the matter.”