A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  The sink. It started with Rob shaving his beard last week and not cleaning up the little hairs. He was busy, exhausted. It happens. Cedric’s response: mix in baby powder and Nivea. Rob, a few days later, added chocolate syrup. Cedric countered with hair shaved from his head and some kind of syrup. Each day one or the other adds a little personal marker.

  Rob crosses the room and surveys the wreckage. The small, squarish basin might pass for abstract expressionism, Rob thinks, like Pollock or one of those guys, with the patterns of straight and curled hairs swirled under a chocolate glaze with threads of Nivea. It’s a representative work, like he figures art should be, of two people who pass one another without words or eye contact but spend idle hours considering how to display their feelings with, say, a splash of condiment on white porcelain. God, he muses, they think about each other more when they’re not talking than when they are. His mind wanders to ketchup. Yes, ketchup would be just right, he decides (makes a mental note to snag some little packets at his dinner break tonight), and then makes a beeline for a quiet corner of the library.

  The next morning, Wednesday, he stops for a moment in the foyer of Metcalf Hall to catch his breath, letting the other kids pass him on their way into the auditorium, dense with tension about the chemistry final. He watches through the propped-open double door as the competition settles into the long wooden rows. It’s not like he’s even premed, like Chiniqua, whom he spots near the aisle, her birdlike arms akimbo, elbows out and pencil scribbling, with her face pressed close to the page. He wants to major in marine biology, something less frenetic and devouring than what his parents do. Not that any of it would excuse a middling score on this test. After all, he’s Rob Burton, number two in his high school class, with a sister at Harvard and folks who excelled academically and always expected that he would, too. It was never a question. It was their presumption, in a way, but one he never needed to challenge because, deep down, it didn’t really matter. If he failed, they’d still love him. He’s sure of it, always has been. He takes a deep breath. Yes, of course, he’ll do just fine. And no longer able to feel his heart thump, Rob casually walks the long aisle to get his test paper, his sandals clomping down the carpeted slope as he begins to feel loose all over.

  That evening, halfway packed for his departure, he strolls down to Thayer Street to meet some friends for a beer at Cafe Paragon, feeling reflective and light-headed. Nursing a beer, unable to summon enough energy to get drunk, Rob finds himself recalling the year that has been “sort of surreal,” a first year in this safe, Disneyland version of tolerance where he could stretch his perspectives and do a bit of experimenting.

  Lifting the beer to his lips, he notices how good the dirt-brown bottle looks clasped under his electric-blue fingernails. A few kids on the hall did their nails earlier tonight, guys and girls both, after Sonya Garza found a bottle of this glittering stuff. A final, wild act. A little later, he sees a girl at a nearby table looking at his nails, and he smiles at her. He loves this, the reactions he’s getting to his nails, how it makes people wonder, just a little, about ol’ Rob Burton.

  The next morning, he still has some packing to do when his father pulls up in the dusty blue Chevy Suburban 1500, one of the old ones, long as a hearse, built before they became the craze. Rob putters around, throwing things in hampers and boxes and casually saying farewells while Dr. Burton patiently mills about. Most people are leaving today—lots have left already—and a remaining cluster of Ira Volker, Florian Keil, and Billy Mosberg follow him here and there, like a Greek chorus. Rob is going to be a peer counselor in the freshman dorms next year, but he’ll stay in touch with these guys. Standing in the hall with them, his dad checking his watch, Rob finds himself smiling dizzily. “I feel like Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz,” he says finally, getting the laugh he needs to prompt a few closing hugs. He turns to his dad, who glances at Rob’s nail polish—says nothing about it—and then slips outside to fire up the tightly packed Suburban. Rob says he’ll be right out. He runs back into the room, thinking he may have left behind a fan but finds his side is barren—just a bare mattress, paper scraps, and dust balls. As he turns to leave, the sink glares at him one last time, and he pauses, remembering Cedric sitting on his bed earlier this morning while he awkwardly stood right about where he is now in the dead center of the room. He knew that his dad would pull up any minute and Cedric would soon be leaving for his calculus final. Rob cleared his throat, which made him feel stupid, and then waded in. “So, I guess this is it,” he ventured tentatively, trying to affect a casual tone, like they’d last talked a moment before, rather than two long weeks. “You know, I’ll be leaving and all this morning, so I may not see you.” Cedric just looked down at his opened calculus book, not blinking. Rob remembers how, at that moment, his skin felt like it was on fire, how his mind grasped frantically for anything that would keep things from ending this way.

  “Well, have good a summer, Cedric,” he finally said, as though things were ending well, as they ought to. “Oh, and lots of luck on your calculus final. I’m sure you’ll do great.” And Rob Burton stood there for a hopeful moment, looking one last time at Cedric Jennings frozen on the bed, before he turned and walked out the door.

  Thanks, Rob,” Cedric had said softly as the heavy white oak slammed against its painted iron frame.

  Did Rob hear him? Or did the words come too late and meet a shut door? Why had he sat there like a statue, while Rob made a final effort to reach out? Why couldn’t he move?

  Walking across campus late that afternoon, Rob now long gone, Cedric replays the scene over in his head for the umpteenth time, each replay ending with the “Thanks, Rob” and questions that he’s sure will knot his gut over the summer.

  It’s not just the recollection of what Rob said and how Cedric failed to reciprocate that eats at him. There’s also something his mother said. He finally called her three days ago, having not phoned for nearly a month. It was good to hear her voice, and they talked about his test schedule and when he’d be coming home before he got around to describing the strife with Rob. He could tell his mom was surprised. The last she’d heard over spring break was that they’d become friendly. As he rambled on about the sink and the silence, he could hear Barbara thinking across the phone line. At his first pause, she jumped in. “It’s a test, Lavar, like I said a while back. But now I’m thinking that if you don’t work this out with Rob, there will be another Rob right behind him. That’s the way the Lord works. He keeps putting up the same test, until we get it right.”

  He mulls over Barbara’s words for a moment, sitting in the late afternoon sunshine on the main green, drinking a ginger ale, and he finds his brow unknitting itself. Yes, she’s right, and, yes, next fall, when they’re no longer on top of each other, he’ll make a point of reaching out to Rob. That woman’s no fool, that’s for sure.

  When he gets back to his room, Zayd is at the door, looking hurried. It prompts a wide smile from Cedric.

  “Cedric, I gotta go, my ride’s here to the airport,” Zayd presses in a loud whisper. He promises to call with his summer address as soon as he gets to Hollywood, where he’s landed an internship at a film production company run by some friends of his parents. Cedric had thought he might have already left.

  Zayd suddenly grins like a pirate and reaches out his long arms.

  “Oh gaawd, no,” Cedric wails as he tries to spin away.

  “Come on, C, give me a hug,” Zayd says, loving it, the cross-cultural frisson, throwing his arms around Cedric’s shoulders.

  “Damn, you white boys are so touchy,” Cedric moans as Zayd squeezes harder and the two of them howl.

  Zayd leaves, and Cedric smiles. A memory to hold on to. He putters around the empty room for a while, sees that the sun is still strong, and ambles back outside to lie on the clean lawn, blades of grass tickling his shaved head. He thinks about his calculus final this morning—leaving only that extra-credit project to finish before he leaves tomorrow—but it�
�s only a moment’s consideration as he drifts off, not caring a whit about who might see him sleeping out here.

  Friday turns out to be a frantic day of packing. Twelve large boxes must be filled, taped, marked, and lugged over to the United Parcel Service office on campus. By the time he’s done lifting the last box onto the counter scale, it’s near dinnertime, only a few hours until the night sleeper departs for Washington.

  Back at the dorm, it’s eerily quiet, and he wanders through the humid hallway. At this point, the evening before the last day of finals, almost everyone is gone, and Cedric finds himself standing in front of his closed door, gazing at his memo pad. There’s a message from Chiniqua, “I’ll see YOU next year. Have a great summer,” and, next to it, one from Molly Olsen, whose note beckons, “Hey, let’s go dancing … Molly.” Next year, he murmurs to himself, I’ll dance.

  Left with him are his beloved boom box (that’s not going to UPS), a suitcase full of clothes, stuff that needs to be dry-cleaned, a plastic bag with some toiletries, and a new Vibe magazine for the train ride. With his white T-shirt and shorts soaked with sweat from lifting boxes on this warmish day, he showers and returns to the room in a towel, looking down at an outfit he’d set aside for the trip home. It’s his last clean ensemble of garments, something he never wore at Brown: his Ballou High School Graduation T-shirt, with the blue and gold knight on the front and matching blue shorts. Maybe wore it once in nine months. He flips the shirt over and spreads it on the bed. On its back are three columns listing 220 seniors, just over half of whom actually graduated, in small type. He lets his mind wander across the names—Phillip Atkins, LaTisha Williams, James Davis, and then Cedric Jennings, a “professional name,” he mulls, that he’s growing into. He’s finally close to feeling comfortable with that name, with himself and who he has become, and he feels a timely need to get back to Washington, to see what home looks like now that he can see so many things more clearly.

  He slips on the shirt and shorts, calls a cab for the train station, and drags his stuff into the parking lot to wait, hoping, as he sits there on his suitcase, that the car doesn’t come for a while, that this tingly, doubled-up sensation of both being and becoming might linger, that he could breathe this night’s air forever.

  It’s already 82 degrees at ten o’clock on a Monday in mid-May, as Barbara Jennings settles into a fabric-covered office chair, her hands folded in her lap, inside the United Planning Organization office on Martin Luther King Avenue.

  She was careful about her dress this morning. Not one of the new dresses she’d picked up this year, like the electric blue one she loves or that elegant black number with the hat that smoothes her figure and turns heads at church.

  For this occasion, she opts for earnest sky blue, a simple one-piece with an ordinary rounded T-shirt collar. The shoes are low-heeled, black, and sensible.

  She fidgets in the office’s waiting area, rehearsing her lines. It’s the type of place Barbara hates to picture herself in, a place for public assistance, for those who cannot conceal their need.

  “We’re very short on assistance money this month,” says the smiling, businesslike woman at the UPO a few minutes later. “I can only offer you about $500.”

  Barbara nods, unable to speak. She was hoping for more, praying for more. The debt Barbara has been building since last December—groaning on a low shelf in her day-to-day thoughts for weeks—just collapsed onto her slouched shoulders. Obligations outstanding, including rent, court costs, and penalties: $2,790. It’s not as though she hasn’t been hustling to find a way to pay it. She has—making calls to aid agencies, thinking about what she can sell, checking if she can get some loans. This morning’s meeting was a last chance.

  “You can come by to pick up $491 tomorrow,” the woman says, searching Barbara’s face. “Is there something else?”

  Barbara looks at her blankly. “No,” she says in a faraway voice. “Nothing.”

  She leaves the office and takes a left onto V Street, pushing past a food stamp line that’s beginning to wrap around the edge of a federal building’s tinted windows. She begins counting her steps on the five-block walk to the apartment as a way to suppress panic.

  When she arrives, panting and sweating from heat, she feels a tingling in her left side and slumps onto the white couch. The bathroom door is closed and the shower is on. Cedric has been home for three days, puttering around the apartment. His summer job doesn’t start until next week. She can hear him singing “Killing Me Softly” over the drumming water. He seems so content, she thinks, oblivious to almost everything, even her.

  Suddenly she shakes her head. What’s she doing, sitting there. There’s one more call she can make. She jumps up and dials a number for a Minister Borden, a Scripture Cathedral assistant pastor who does community work in this area. They talked a little last week—he didn’t have any quick fixes—and Barbara kept it casual, saying she’ll keep looking, wanting at that point to keep her troubles away from the church, a realm where her standing is so high.

  She reaches him and goes through it all again. The direness of it all, with only two hours left, and the huge amount due. Borden is sympathetic but not particularly encouraging. “It’s a lot of money, Barbara,” he says, wondering if maybe he, himself, could borrow it from someone, sort of on her behalf. “I’ll see what I can do,” he tells her. “But, even if I can, I don’t think there’s enough time.”

  In a few minutes, creamed and brushed and slipping on a T-shirt, Cedric emerges from the bedroom.

  “What are you doing home,” he asks absently on his way to the refrigerator. “No work?”

  She takes a deep breath. “I’ve failed you again,” she says quietly.

  “What?” he says, barely hearing, pouring some orange juice.

  “I’ve let you down again, Lavar.”

  He puts down the glass. “What you saying?”

  “We’ve got trouble. I fell behind, way behind and, umm …. You’ll have to pack up your things. We’re getting put out at one o’clock.”

  Everything halts. After a few seconds, he steps from the kitchen area into the well of the living room and glares at her. Barbara cannot meet his eye. Her own son, and she can’t look at him. She looks down at her wrinkled hands.

  “Put out?!” He seems disoriented, but a moment later he’s clearly not. “So, how much?” Cedric says icily, in what sounds like someone else’s voice. “How much is it … this time?”

  “$2,790.”

  “Good God,” he whispers. “How’s that possible?” Barbara watches, standing there stunned. She gets up and calls Neddy at work. Neddy says she’s calling the church, hangs up, and then calls back to tell Barbara that she’d just left a panicked message on the Scripture Cathedral answering machine.

  “What happened, Ma?” Neddy starts in, and with each barbed question she unearths another corner of the debacle—the six months of back rent, the court hearing, the desperate attempts to cobble together a huge payment—as Cedric stomps in a circle nearby, picking up every syllable. Barbara finally tells Neddy about her conversation a few minutes ago with Minister Borden.

  “He said he could do it all quietly. Thing is, I didn’t want to call Bishop Long, call the church and have it all over church I was being put out,” Barbara says, but now, with the hammer coming down in less than two hours, such concerns suddenly seem vain and foolish.

  “Ma, me even calling the church now won’t do no good. In any event, there’s not enough time,” Neddy says. She says she’ll try to leave work. “I’ll be over as soon as I can.” Barbara hangs up, her hand shaking as she replaces the receiver.

  “This is really the sin of pride,” Cedric says, measuring each word. “Too proud to tell you got a problem. Why didn’t you tell anyone? I might have been able to help. Could have called Dr. Korb or something. Or taken from my $200 a month, or SOMETHIN’! Here I’m buying CDs and … oh my God, we are getting PUT OUT!”

  “I didn’t want to burden you with this,” s
he says. “You had work to do.”

  “You don’t tell me and Neddy nothing and then it blows up on ALL OF US!”

  He sits on a dinette chair, head in his hands, and the yelling stops. As the minutes tick, both of them slip into hushed contemplation of their shared fate.

  The silence is unbearable for Barbara, and she tries to reach out with something she wasn’t going to tell him. “This has been terrible for me, Lavar, the stress,” she says haltingly, and she describes how chest pains overcame her in the office last Thursday and half her body went numb. It’s better that he knows. They sent her to the Agriculture Department medical office, where a doctor suggested she see a cardiologist. Cedric listens to this and nods, almost sorrowfully, then rises and slowly walks to his room. Barbara hears the lopsided double bed wheeze under his weight. Then she hears sniffling and wonders if she ever felt so low.

  At 12:40 P.M., there’s a knock on the door of Apartment 307. She answers it.

  “Barbara Jennings?”

  “Yes, that’s me.” A short, bald man with thick, freckled arms dangling from white cotton short sleeves is standing in the hallway. His tie knot is the size of a fist.

  “Ma’am, my name is Steve Turner from the U.S. Marshall’s Service and I’m here to evict you from these premises. You understand how this works?” He holds out a gold badge in a leather case, chest high, so she can’t miss it.

  Barbara swings herself back with the opening door as Turner leads in a procession of eight poorly dressed black men and a heavy woman about Barbara’s age in an “I Love Coffee” T-shirt—the landlord’s moving crew—all of whom pass inches from her without a glance. She feels outside of her body, underwater and moving in slow motion, but noticing every detail—the gun on Turner’s hip, the cartoon of a steaming coffee cup on the woman’s shirt, the dirty hands of the workmen, hands that are already being laid on all she owns.