by Mia Mckenzie
When we get to her block, loaded up with books, our bellies full of water ice and soft pretzels, I feel a whole universe better than I did after seeing Tasha’s Facebook page. I’m also sleepy, in that good, fun weekend way, and all I want to do is go back to my room, crawl into bed, and close my eyes. Then Vicky spots a black car that’s parked out front of her house and says, “Uncle Nick’s here!” And I perk right up.
14
I move to follow Vicky up the front steps.
“You’re coming in?” she asks, surprised, since I already said I was going home to nap.
“I think I left my, um…room key in there earlier,” I say. “I’ma just get it.”
“Vicky!” a voice calls from up the block. We both turn and see Reverend Seymour hurrying toward us. “Are Faye and Nick around?” she asks the kid. “I rang your bell but there was no answer.”
“Uncle Nick’s car is here,” Vicky says. “Maybe they’re having sex or something.”
“Jesus, Vicky!”
The reverend frowns at me, as if she’s way more offended by me taking the name of her lord in vain. Then a look flashes across her face, something worried but low-key. That’s when I notice she’s wearing sneakers and the laces are only halfway tied, like she did them in a rush. She glances down the block toward her house, then back at me.
“What’s your name, sister?” she asks me.
“Skye.”
“Sister Skye! You’re a friend of Vicky and Faye’s, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.” A friend of Vicky’s, anyway.
“Sister Skye,” the reverend says, “I wonder if I could trouble you for some help.”
“Um. Sure. I mean, I guess. What kind of help?”
She looks like she’s not sure whether or not she wants to tell me. Which sort of piques my interest. “I have a little situation,” she says finally. “At my house. I’d handle it myself, but I can’t lift more than a few pounds. I had back surgery earlier this year.”
Manual labor? Absolutely not, ma’am. Has she not noticed that I’m practically a comic-strip rendering of a bookish girl, with my thick-framed glasses and skinny arms? My whole persona screams DON’T ASK ME TO HELP YOU MOVE and that’s not by accident. I don’t even like to sweat during sex and that’s fun.
I start to shake my head, no. “I actually need to—”
“We can help!” Vicky says, excited, like somebody just asked us to finish off some cake.
The reverend clasps her hands together. “Good neighbors,” she says, smiling at the kid and then at me. “Thank you.”
* * *
—
Inside, Reverend Seymour’s house looks like the houses of my childhood, like the houses of my grandparents and great-grandparents, especially, with its floral wallpaper, small grandfather clock in a corner, and painting of a skinny, long-haired Jesus hanging on the dining room wall, although this Jesus is Black, which the Jesuses of my childhood never were. We follow the reverend upstairs to the second floor and down a short hallway to some more stairs, which lead up to a door. The door is closed, and at first she just stands there looking at it, not saying anything.
After a few seconds, I’m like, “What are we doing?”
“The door is locked,” she says.
“Where’s the key?”
“Inside.”
“Okay,” I say. “Is there…a spare?”
“Sister Skye,” she says, looking amused, “if there was a spare, I wouldn’t have had to bring you all the way down here.” She doesn’t say it like she thinks I’m dumb, but she doesn’t say it like she thinks I’m smart, either.
“I thought I came down here to help you lift a heavy box.”
She shakes her head. “I never said anything about lifting a box.”
I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I’m pretty sure there was lifting involved. Now I don’t know what’s going on. I look at Vicky, who just kind of shrugs.
“Do you want me to kick the door in?”
“Can you?” the reverend asks me, sounding unsure.
“Probably not.”
There’s a butter knife sitting on a small table near the closed door. She picks it up and holds it out to me. “I thought you could jimmy it. I tried, but my arthritis…”
I peer at her. “You don’t have a dead body in there, do you?”
“No! Of course not! Sister Skye, how could you even—”
“Okay, okay, I’m just making sure.”
Vicky giggles.
I take the knife and try to slide the tip of it into the doorjamb. It’s not easy, even without arthritis.
“Jiggle it upward,” Vicky says.
“I am jiggling it upward.”
Reverend Seymour is just standing there watching me. This would normally make me feel uneasy, the way people of the cloth tend to, with their oppressive come-to-Jesus vibes, but it doesn’t, because her energy is super chill. “I’ve noticed you coming and going a lot lately,” she says. “But I’ve never had a chance to talk with you. You usually look like you’d rather be left alone.”
That’s accurate.
“Do you live close by?” she asks. It strikes me as a question you ask when you really want to ask something more pointed—like, Why are you suddenly here all the time?—but you don’t want to seem rude.
“I stay close by,” I tell her. “When I’m in town.”
“You don’t live in Philadelphia?”
“Nope.”
“But you’re from here, aren’t you?” she asks. “You don’t have much of the accent, but there’s…” She thinks about it. “Philadelphian energy about you.”
I sort of know what she means. I can usually identify a Philadelphian if I run into one out in the world.
She asks where I live now, where I travel, if I still have family here, if I still have a lot of friends in the area. I tell her I live everywhere, or nowhere, depending how you look at it, that I travel all over the world, that I have family here but I don’t see much of them, that no, I don’t have a lot of friends in the area. “What about a church?” she asks. “Do you have a church you go to when you’re here?”
“No.”
The reverend’s eyebrows draw close together. She peers at me. “Well, what do you have?”
Wow. Okay. Up in my business much?
“Who are your people?” she asks me. “Where is your community?”
I shrug. “I don’t really believe in community.”
“You think it’s a trick of the light?” she asks. “Like the Loch Ness Monster?”
El oh el.
“It’s just been my experience that people don’t actually care as much as they pretend to,” I tell her.
“About what?”
“About everything. About other people.”
“About other people? Who, specifically?” she asks.
“No one specifically. Just people. In general.”
She smiles at me. It’s a kind smile.
The butter knife slips down against the lock and, with a click, the door swings open. When it does, I almost shit. There is a nearly naked elderly Asian man, sprawled tighty-whitey-clad-ass-side-up, on the floor.
“He fell,” Reverend Seymour says anxiously, hurrying into the room. “When he tried to get up, his back gave out.”
The man, who is mid-sixties, chubby, and very balding, eyes me suspiciously as I enter, then says to the reverend, “Where’s Nick?”
“You know Uncle Nick?” Vicky asks.
“He and Faye helped us out the last time Phil fell down,” the reverend tells her. Then, to Phil, “Brother Nick, uh…isn’t available.”
He frowns.
“This is Sister Vicky and Sister Skye. Sisters, this Brother Philip Michael Nguyen. He’s a good friend of mine.”
“She doesn’t look strong, LaVonda,” he says, studying my physique. “She’s very skinny.”
“Oh, she’s stronger than she looks,” Reverend Seymour says, looking at me. “Right?”
“I think I’m probably exactly as strong as I look.”
Reverend Seymour laughs. Brother Philip Michael Nguyen does not.
“We can just go,” I tell the reverend.
“No, no,” she says. “Brother Nguyen is just embarrassed. Seeming ungrateful is his defense mechanism. Isn’t that right, Phil?”
Brother Nguyen frowns, sighs. “Maybe so,” he says. “No one wants to be found like this by strangers. It’s humiliating, you know? And a kid, too?”
“I see my pop-pop in his underwear all the time,” Vicky says reassuringly. “He just walks around like that.”
“Do you think you can get him up?” the reverend asks me.
“I can try. Should we, um, get him dressed first?”
“Up first,” says Brother Nguyen. “Please.”
I move closer to him, examining his position on the floor, trying to decide how best to proceed. When I was about twelve, I lived with my grandparents for a few months, because home didn’t feel good or safe, and one night my great-grandfather, who lived there, too, fell down on his way into the bathroom. My grandfather wasn’t home, so I had to help my grandmother get her father-in-law up off the cold tile floor. I remember how frail my great-grandfather looked, and how guilty I felt, because I was the one who had turned the light off in the hallway, which made it hard for him to see where he was going. To ease the guilt, I decided it was my great-grandfather’s fault, really, because if he had been a better parent, he’d have raised better kids, and then my grandfather would have been a better parent, who, in turn, raised better kids, and then my mother would have been a better parent and I’d have been at home where I should have been that night, instead of turning off lights in other people’s houses.
I can tell from looking at him that Brother Nguyen is too heavy for me to lift on my own. He’s not overweight so much as he’s what I’d call “meaty.” He has thick limbs and a torso like a small, fleshy tree trunk. Good news is, there’s a bed at the other end of the room and it’s in a wooden frame with a lip at the foot of it. Maybe Brother Nguyen can use it for leverage.
“Can you crawl to the bed?” I ask him.
He frowns, shakes his head. “Tried already.”
“Okay, then. I’m going to have to try to drag you over there. Is that cool with you?”
He nods.
I hook the crooks of my elbows under his armpits and give a tug. He doesn’t move a single centimeter.
“Use your core, Sister Skye,” Reverend Seymour says.
Thanks for the tip, but also: My core doesn’t work like that!
“Put your feet flat against the floor,” I tell Brother Nguyen. “And try to push yourself back, while I pull.”
He nods. He bends his knees and pushes against the floor with the bottoms of his feet. I pull, and his body moves a fraction of an inch. I pull harder and he moves just a little bit more. Ugh, this is going to take forever! I take a deep breath and put my best effort into it, pulling with all my might. Brother Nguyen starts moving a little faster across the floor and this is when I notice that the rug is bunching up underneath him, and his underwear, caught on the fold, is starting to slip down.
Oh, no. Oh, God, no.
“Wait,” I say, just as he pushes with his feet again.
This is the moment when I should look away. But for some reason? I CAN’T. I watch as his underwear slips down just enough that his penis shaft pops out of the top, like a bald, colorless sea snake poking up out of the sandy seabed.
Reverend Seymour hurries over, and in one quick movement she hikes her boyfriend’s tighty-whiteys up over his wrinkly peen. But it’s too late, because I can never unsee it. It’s burned into my memory like…well, like an old man’s dick, quite frankly. I look over at Vicky. She’s at the window with her phone camera held up to the glass, pointing down toward the street. On the one hand, this is highly suspicious. On the other hand, she seems to be completely distracted. Which is good because I’m pretty sure elderly prick isn’t on the list of things I should be exposing her to.
Two trillion minutes later, Brother Nguyen and I reach the bed. He puts one arm around my shoulder, places his other forearm on the lip of wooden bed frame, and pushes himself up, while I pull. It works. In a minute, he’s up, sitting on the edge of the bed.
Reverend Seymour grabs a blanket and wraps it around his shoulders.
I wipe sweat off my forehead.
Brother Nguyen takes my hand in both of his. “LaVonda was right,” he says. “You are strong.”
“Can I have this?”
We all turn to look at Vicky. She’s left the window and is pointing to a dusty purple hat that’s stashed on a shelf in a corner.
“That was my late husband’s,” Reverend Seymour says.
“Oh,” the kid replies. “Never mind. Sorry.”
The reverend walks over to the shelf, takes the hat down. “It’s not doing anybody any good up here, is it?” She hands the hat to Vicky.
The kid takes it, beaming, and thanks her.
While Reverend Seymour helps Brother Nguyen put on a shirt, I cross the room to examine the hat more closely. It’s a purple felt fedora with a pheasant feather in it, old school, like something my granddad would have worn whilst seeking out a woman to commit adultery with. “You’re seriously going to wear this?”
Vicky shrugs. “Prince would’ve.”
“He wasn’t in seventh grade.”
“Everybody was in seventh grade at some point.” She puts on the hat and examines her reflection in a full-length mirror that’s propped up against a wall.
And, you know what? She looks cool as hell. I watch her turning her head from side to side, admiring herself, and suddenly I’m smiling from ear to ear because here is a twelve-year-old girl who knows exactly how to wear a purple fedora with a pheasant feather in it.
But then, there’s a moment. I see something flash in Vicky’s eyes, something familiar: self-doubt. It appears in an instant, like a crocodile coming out of the murky water, jaws open, to snap a baby wildebeest and pull it under. I watch her move to take off the hat, and I am overwhelmed with the memory of being a twelve-year-old girl in constant battle, over what I saw when I looked in the mirror and what I feared other people would see. Other people, whose opinions of me always seemed to matter more than my own.
Sometimes, even what I knew to be true about myself was vulnerable to other people’s revision. When I was thirteen, I failed algebra because I was so depressed that I missed a whole bunch of school days that year. My father said I’d failed because I was stupid. I was smart; I knew that for certain. But I remember wondering, in that moment, Am I stupid? I looked at my mother, who was standing nearby and had to have heard what he said, and waited for her to say he was wrong, to reaffirm what I knew. But she just kept on seasoning chicken thighs and said nothing. This memory, which I haven’t conjured in years, cuts through me now like a hot blade, and I feel a seared breath catch in my lungs.
Vicky has turned and is staring at me like she’s trying to see inside me again. I don’t know why, but this time I let her. I don’t look away or make a joke. I just stand there. It’s just a few seconds, but it feels like eons. When I can’t take it anymore, I nod at the purple hat, which is still on her head, and say, “You were right. It looks perfect on you, Vick.”
She grins at me, then turns around to face the mirror again.
As I stand there watching her adore her reflection, I want to hug her and protect her from all the things in the world that will try to crush this self-love out of her. But I don’t want to be weird about it, kna’mean?
“Vicky?”
“Huh?”
“Do you know where that Marco kid lives?”
She stops modeling the hat and looks at me. “Yeah. Why?”
“I could go kick his ass if you want.”
“You’re a grown-up,” she says. “He’s a kid.”
If he’s old enough to hold a girl down, he’s old enough to get his ass beat, in my opinion. “No one will even know it was me. I’ll punch him super hard in the kidneys six or seven times and then disappear into the night. Gimme his address.”
She giggles. Then she looks like she’s thinking for a second and says, “I kneed him in the balls real hard. He was walking kinda funny for a while. I think he got the message or whatever.”
I nod. “Okay.”
“But thanks,” she says, smiling at me. “That’s real ride or die.”
15
To thank us for the help, Brother Nguyen insists we stay for bánh bò. “I made it last night,” he says. “So, it’s nice and fresh.”
My belly’s still full of water ice and soft pretzels. Plus, I’m eager to get to Vicky’s house and steal a look at Faye’s fiancé. But I already know Vicky well enough to know that she’s not about to turn down cake under any circumstances. So, I relent.
We sit on the reverend’s back porch, looking out at her little flower garden, which is full of orange marigolds, purple morning glories, and pink-and-cream snapdragons. The bánh bò is chewy and soft. Brother Nguyen watches us eat it, looking pleased.
“Have you ever been to Ethiopia?” Reverend Seymour asks me.
“No, ma’am,” I say. “I have not.”
“I haven’t, either, unfortunately. But Brother Nguyen and I saw an amazing documentary a few nights ago, about hyenas in…where was it, Phil?”
“Harar.”
“Yes, that’s it,” she says. “Harar. The hyenas come right into the city and the people feed them. They think the hyenas are spirits. They pet the animals and even feed them by hand. And the hyenas let them. Isn’t that fascinating?”