“I guess I’ll go find him.”
“Why you gonna do that?”
“He’s my friend.”
“Well, I guess that’s what you have, huh? Hah!” Her cackle cracked in the dark. Then she waited for a response from me. “What, baby? Ain’t you gonna sit — stay for a while?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “You know when you were young, a baby, you were so smiley.” She took another drink. “What happened?”
When I get to Starbucks, Kelly points at a table in the front by the window and mouths, “Sit,” to me. I do, bent over to relieve my stomach. I start to feel my body. I’m tired. My hands feel like they’re swollen, getting more so all the time, and they want to close into a fist on their own. I flatten them, palms down, on the table.
“You look even tireder.” She sets a coffee down. “Is that even a word?” I straighten up and think I feel my stomach lining tear. I suppose I grimace because she looks concerned.
“Baby, you all right?”
“Yeah. Just a little beat.”
She looks me over, my unwashed hands and arms and my filthy shirt.
“You’re dirty.”
“Yeah.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” she shakes her head. Raises her voice a half octave. “You shouldn’t be out looking like you do.”
“I know.”
“Take a bath.”
“Yes.”
“Get a massage.”
“Okay.”
“Have a nice dinner.”
“Sure.”
“Then go to bed.” She says this while starting to walk away. She stops. “That’s for free — the advice, too.”
“Thank you.”
“You hungry? We have some muffins we’re just gonna throw away.”
“I’m good. Thank you.”
“Stop. You know I love you.”
She snaps her towel and leaves me. There’s a line forming. There always seems to be a four-thirty rush — postschool, postcamp, post-nanny. I remember this world, of strollers, cooing mothers, and sporadically employed fathers — alleged writers. I used to write in cafés before I had children.
Someone sneezes, and I sit up. There are two women seated in armchairs. Close to one is a small child sleeping in a stroller. The other woman has a toddler on her lap. He obviously has a cold. He has dried snot trails beneath his nostrils. She absentmindedly feeds him broccoli. He can’t breath through his nose, so he inhales deeply with his mouth while pulping the florets.
I turn away. His mother says something that sounds like “There’s a lot of reciprocity in our relationship.” I look out the big window to Dean Street, then to the corner of Court and beyond, to the south, across the dogleg intersection. There’s a minivan waiting at the light. I can tell it’s going to make the illegal dash, the wrong way across the intersection instead of turning right. “Yeah,” responds the first mother, “I know exactly what you mean.” I wonder if it’s possible to quantify reciprocity — love. You either give back or you don’t. You love or you don’t. You drink or you don’t. And that’s the rub — the either or. I hope her partner excuses her abuse of language, the intellectual masquerade, the self-help quackery. What doesn’t she give back? What is she capable of giving other than a limp screw and nonsense. Nonsense.
Her kid has climbed off her lap, blown a snot bubble, and now stumbles toward me. He waves at me. She beams as though he’s achieved something. She warbles something, and he waddles back to her. She produces a bottle of juice and again is amazed when he takes hold of it and drinks.
“Is it good juice?” she asks, high-pitched and far too loud. He takes a break, nods, and then continues with his snuffle-sucking.
Sometimes my mother had to take me to work. She would put me in a chair, give me a book, and tell me not to move, not to make a sound. She’d do the same in stores and on buses. I listened to her, not because I was scared of being punished; it just always seemed the right thing to do — to make us both okay. Lila’s wrath was terrible, but death was even worse, and a failure of wits, of equipoise, of dignity, a lack of quality was death: Keep your black ass still or thou shalt die and not live. I wonder if I’ve been too hard on my boys, especially C: having him sit up straight, chew with his mouth closed, and display a certain amount of dignity — as though he was going to face German shepherds and batons in Selma or cops behind Faneuil Hall. The stakes weren’t that high anymore. How had it been passed on? I certainly was proud of him, privately, perhaps too much so — the privacy. They would sit and sip their hot chocolate, but is their fight mine? Was mine my parents? Was there really any fight at all save the fight against throwing oneself in? Claire would always try to intervene — when I’d be demanding that he swing the bat correctly, that he answer my questions clearly in both thought and diction — try to tell me that he was just a little boy. Brown boy, I’d grumble in my head. Sometimes he’d weep, and she’d ask me why I needed to drill him so and say this would come back to haunt me. “He’s just a little boy. You’re probably halting his progress.” And I’d say it — unrelenting—“There is no dignity in progress. The dignity is the progress.” And C is a good boy — a sweet boy. Content with whatever comes his way, which seems to me a fatal flaw. Brown boys have to be more — smarter, tougher, and possess a dignified tenacity.
The boy is back. He’s pointing the broccoli-flecked nipple at me as an offering — the viscous trail on his lip. He grunts at me belligerently and makes a face like he’s trying to pinch a hard one off. His mother isn’t watching. I could probably get four blocks with him before she realized he was gone. I want to speak—Madam, the boy needs discipline. So do you. You are cruel to the boy, and when he comes to adulthood, he’ll realize that you robbed him of his chance to walk with dignity. He’ll be snot-faced and wanting, needing to fudge all his data to convince himself he’s not — that he is good. And where’s the quality in that? No wonder the White House is full of cretins. There’s no discipline, no dignity. We welcome the inept. We celebrate the mediocre and run in horror when we realize the effort required to be good and stay good — fuck!
I’ll give the little snot-faced kid this: He’s tenacious, still hovering by my table, still pinch faced, waiting for my acknowledgment.
“Hey, kid,” I grunt like an old salt. The women, in unison, coo.
I look up. There’s a woman on the corner. There’s no traffic, but she’s waiting to cross. The light changes. The minivan makes its move — diagonally across Court. When it reaches the opposite crosswalk, she steps off the curb and throws herself over the hood. The van stops. The driver gets out — a little man. Then I see Shaky. He’s across the street, in front of the corner pub. He watches the driver with a flat affect. He rubs his hands together, points a finger in the air, and then sprints off the curb toward the scene. He looks like he’s screaming, “Hey, you!” Now he’s pointing at the man, who fearfully shifts from his victim to Shaky to the gathering Samaritans, who will claim that they saw everything. Shaky traps him against the van and starts screaming in his face. The women in the easy chairs finally notice. “What happened?” they ask each other, and then shake their heads in tandem. They look at me but don’t ask — content to stare outside ignorantly.
Two firemen run up the hill and tend to the downed woman. A police car comes and stops in the middle of Court Street. The Samaritans recreate the crime with arm gestures. Now Shaky’s just nodding — cooled off. The mother of the sleeping child mutters to her friend, “Wrong way. What an asshole.” Then tries to apologize for cursing with a shrug and a sheepish look.