“What you need to do is relax, make sense of things. Your dad’s passing, this girl, the crazy house.”
“I got crackheads at that house.”
“Everybody’s got crackheads. Look, Germantown’s changed — it’s come back up. This is the hot new place to live, man. Prices are soaring. But this is still Germantown.”
“That night was like…it was eerie. I thought they were ghosts. For a second I was like, ‘This is some paranormal ish or something.’ ” I laugh this out, wait to see their reaction.
Tosha just wags her head.
“There are no ghosts,” she says.
“How can you know that?”
“Because your black ass would already be packed up and leaving town again.” I laugh at this too but she doesn’t, and in the silence I get the feeling I might be being insulted, so I laugh harder till George spares me with his interruption.
“I’ll make sure a squad car makes a regular drive-by, but don’t let those crack fiends mess with your head,” he says.
—
Tosha and George’s children, these three great kids, they are everything my life is missing. I watch George with them, and I’m certain of this. He has purpose and joy, there is a slot in the universe he is fitting, without which there would be a black hole. I totally know, because I live in the black hole. Becks was right. Across the breakfast bar the kids yell out “Uncle Warren” at me and there is an authority in that title. I haven’t earned even “uncle,” and yet still it fills me. I never managed the duties of “son” particularly well, in regard to both my parents. At “husband” I was an even grander disappointment, and I stink of divorced man so bad that even I can smell it, as if every nose hair reeked of its own disappointment. I’ve been failing at “father” for years without even realizing I could claim the title.
“You got to make up the time.” George leans over, puts a hand on my shoulder. Grips. “You have to educate her, man. Tosha’s right on that one. That’s your path to being her father, a chance to give her something. Make sure she gets back to school, and goes to college. You do that, you’ll have started making an impact.”
I make the mistake of asking George how much tuition costs. I don’t know where their kids go to school, but I do know he has to send them to private. George is just a public servant, and that ain’t paying but so much. Tosha is an administrator for the school district, but it doesn’t matter. This is Germantown, and they are middle-class, and I know they’re not letting their little angels loose in Lingelbach Elementary to eek out survival. Our childhood was all about Lingelbach Elementary. It was about finding a school to go to so you didn’t have to go to Lingelbach Elementary. Seeing if you could use a mailing address in Mt. Airy, or getting your parents to send you to private. It was about staying inside in the hour and a half after those kids were released back into the community, lest their tsunami of juvenile chaos catch you in its wave. On some days you could hear their mob coming south on Pulaski at 3:30 P.M., watch the streets fill with the lumpen youth parade before disappearing again. Even my father, as oblivious as he was, would manage to keep in the back of the house during that procession. Tal would be too old for Lingelbach, but my father’s mansion is zoned to Germantown High, the teenage equivalent. I had friends that went to Germantown, the ones that couldn’t find their way out to a magnet program. My primary memory of Germantown was that they threw a math teacher off the roof. This story seems suspect now, maybe nothing more than an urban legend, but the fact that it has taken me thirty years to even question it is because Germantown High is the kind of school where a math teacher being thrown off a roof seems perfectly plausible. Still, when George breaks down how much he’s paying for each child to go to their private Quaker school, for a second I imagine Tal Karp roaming the halls of Germantown High, books in hand. A pioneering young Jewess the likes of which those halls have not seen in sixty years.
“I can’t pay that much.” There’s no sheepishness in my confession. It’s not that I wouldn’t do it; I just don’t have the money. Maybe, maybe if my father’s house sold, I could put that money down, but school starts this week. “Is Germantown High any better now?” I turn to ask Tosha directly. Her strongly negative response involves as much body language as syllables.
“Charter schools. That’s what people are doing now. They’re free, there’s usually a theme. There’s an Asian one in Chinatown and a black one, not too far from you, past Wayne Junction. Umoja. Guy I used to work with’s the principal. I’ll give you the brochure. That’s what you need for her: real Afrocentric, positive. But not Germantown High.” Tosha grimaces, her hand waving the idea out of the air like so much flatulence. “Don’t let her first real experience with black folks be running from them.”
“You need to clear your head, get out in the open air,” George says. “You need to get back on your bike. I still got the Harley. Needs to be run and I don’t have time. I poured a couple thousand into it since you sold it to me, but I’ll give you a good deal on it. You want to impress your daughter, let her see her old man rolls in style.”
“Buy the bike back, Warren. I’ll show you where it is,” Tosha tells me. When George briefly turns his back to Tosha, she mouths Please! and makes shooing motions with her hands.
“Look, they say being a father’s just about showing up,” George says when he turns back around. “It’s true, too, the standards really are that low. You show up, you don’t beat them, you love them, you pay for stuff. That’s all there is to it.” On this final phrase, George slaps my back. He slaps hard, not hard enough to hurt me but enough to say he could do it if he tried. He is a man. He is a father. He’s licensed to carry a gun. It makes me love Tosha even more, because she saw all the way back then that he would become a man and I wouldn’t. I used to want a time machine so I could go back and stop George from taking her from me. Now I want one to go back even further and make him my father too.
—
“George’s fucking some white dude and he hasn’t lived here in a year,” Tosha tells me in the garage. It seems so improbable, illogical, that I just say who?, but she ignores me. “He just comes over for breakfast, tells the kids he’s working the late shift. He tells me we’re just separated, but he’s leaving me. I know it, I fucking know he is.”
“Who is?” I ask again, but it’s such a stupid question she doesn’t answer and I don’t expect her to, so I follow with “Who with?” after an appropriate pause.
“I don’t know but I’m going to prove it, too. I’ve got him under surveillance,” Tosha tells me. I look at her, and I try not to smile, but there’s a little hint there because I’m thinking she must be wrong. I’m not willing for her marriage to be in trouble. They have everything I am sure brings happiness. They have two beautiful kids, and one okay-looking one. They have a big house, a big solid six-bedroom house made of fieldstone and old wood and it looks sturdy enough to withstand a hurricane or tornado, even though none of those things happen in Philadelphia. George is a detective. George is a black detective. That’s about as close as you can get to being a superhero. Tosha, her lips still full, her nose still broad and bold, is an African goddess sent to humble the racists who would mock any aspect of black femininity. She still stuns me, when I look over at her. Tosha’s thick thighs can run half marathons and her red tongue can quote from Hamlet in the exact voice of Maya Angelou. If these two aren’t happy, if they can’t make it work with all the tools at their disposal, we are all doomed, and I refuse to accept that. I shake my head no, but she doesn’t heed me.