I laugh, though this does bother me. A barrage of insults when I walk in the door?
“Telisha, I wanted to ask you … you know Dwayne Jefferson, don’t you? He said you were pals.”
The name stings. “Yes. Why?”
“He’s been calling me, asking me out. I think it turns him on, I was a finalist for the Cowboys cheerleading thing? I like him well enough, I guess, but there’s something … a kind of arrogance …”
“Stay away from him.” My own force shocks me.
“Really? What do you know?”
“Nothing, just … I agree with you. About the arrogance.” Do I lay it all out for her? What purpose would that serve? Can I trust her, or would the story get out, all over the mayor’s office? I’ve never had a white black woman. “Just be careful, Shirk I don’t think he’s a good guy.”
“Okay, thanks.” She’s disappointed.
She says she’s run through the Terra Fin flake food. I tell her to make things easy for herself and get some long-term feeding tablets for the aquarium. My voice wobbles, saying good-bye. It’s not Shirley’s fault — she asked an innocent question — but I’m angry at her for unsettling me.
“Say, fly lady, I’m amp over here,” one of the b-boys calls. “I ain’t gaffling you, babe, come on over now and check out my hard, honey bozack. It’s fiending for you. No shit, sugar.”
His posse cracks up. “Aw, get off the woman’s bra strap, G. She come backed up.”
“I just want her to lamp wit’ me.”
“Look to me like a Mickey T.”
I step through the weeds, watching for rats, annoyed at my thready jeans, which attract sticker burrs left and right, but grateful I didn’t put on shorts this morning, which might have amped the boys even more. Hide as much flesh as you can — a habit with me. Cool J’s rapping now about a “playette” with toe rings whose sexual prowess can turn a prince into a king. I cross the street, pause on a dirt path where a sidewalk should be, and pluck the thorns from my pants. At the happy hours with Shirley and others from work, in Fuddruckers or Fridays or Chilis, rock-and-roll muzak usually plays, but occasionally a rap tune will jump through the speakers. “You ever really listen to this shit, the hardcore stuff?” a mayor’s aide asked the table one evening. “It’s ‘mothafucka mothafucka mothafucka.’ That’s it.”
“Maybe they’ll all kill themselves and save us the trouble,” said a buddy of his.
The men on the porch are doing a pretty good job, right now, of erasing themselves. The yard is littered with drained malt liquor cans, blue as diamonds in the sunlight. The old scarecrow from the gut bucket is with them, swaying on the balls of his feet, eyes closed, grinning at the secrets in his head.
I cut through several more overgrown fields, back to Bitter’s. Compared with Dallas, Houston is magnificently lush. Willows, pines, magnolias. Big D is mostly parking lots now, especially downtown, where all-day parking can cost as little as seventy-five cents, so many lots are competing — a consequence of the development addiction that kicked in during the eighties and hasn’t let up since. I recall shopping one day, about six years ago, and realizing how much Dallas felt like Disneyland now, standardized and gaudy, not a place where real people lived and worked (though amazingly we did work there, stuffed into our power-lunch costumes — like so many smiling mice).
Bitter’s not home — just a note saying, “Errands.” I gather my laundry, pass through the kitchen to the back porch pantry and Bitter’s old washer. Maybe I should buy a couple new T-shirts to tide me over, the next ten days or so. I check Bitter’s room, to see if he’s left any dirty clothes. A pair of boxers, socks, and a shirt. I snatch them up, glimpse by his bed, in a squatty bookshelf, half a dozen paperbacks: titles and authors I’ve never seen. Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim. Trick Baby. Pimp: The Story of My Life. Bookplates stiffen the back covers: “Property of Buck Jackson,” the barber who Bitter said used to run a lending library out of his shop. The books look silly, but I stand for a minute absorbing their fusty smell, the scent of all the years I lost when I should have been here, reading the same trash Uncle read, listening to his music, eating his bad fried food.
On the top shelf of his open closet, a familiar white shape: one of Mama’s quilts. My heartbeat quickens. I pull it down. It’s fusty, too, a cloud of mothballs and lint. I never learned the patterns, though I remember Mama talking about Log Cabins, Bow Ties, Shooflies. On this one, uneven lines dodge through rough squares, triangles tipple over rows of heavy brown knots. The cotton backing is soft and cool.
“Follow the gourd …” She used to sing to me as she stuffed thick batting between fabric layers. I’d be sitting at her feet in Bitter’s kitchen, watching. How did it go? “The river’s bank” something something. “Dead trees …” I’ve lost it. I hummed the tune as she sang, rocking on the hardwood floor, delighting in the winglike movements of her hands, fluttering across jagged strips of brown, green, gold. “‘Nother river on the other side …”
Later, in my teens, I felt ashamed of her work, its ripply lines and apparently random designs; embarrassed when company came and saw the quilts curled across the couch. I felt her amateurishness would reflect badly on me. In Dale Licht’s house she sewed in a tiny room just off the kitchen overlooking her backyard flower garden, azaleas and purple irises. When I’d get home from school and rummage through the fridge for string cheese, pickles, or strawberries, she’d call to me from that sunny little room, ask me to come sit with her as she snipped thread or appliquéd beads to raffia cloth. Usually I refused, mumbling, “Homework.” When I did linger, I was struck by how much her hands had slowed over the years, how tough it was for her to tie a simple knot. Still, she worked with patience, humming peacefully, and occasionally I’d feel pleasure in watching her bring something out of nothing, a magic as great as the spells Bitter extolled.
I sit on his bed now with the quilt across my knees, hoping to catch Mama’s smell in the stitches, adding small tears to the patchwork.
Bitter’s still not back. Probably he’s doing what he always does when I’m not around, buying food, hanging out with his friends, living his life, but his health’s got me so flummoxed, his every absence feels chancy. I fold the clean clothes, sweep and dust, straighten the sofa. The Angela Davis Reader sits, heat-curled, on the coffee table. I remember Reggie mentioning the other night he had meetings each morning this week, “lovefests with potential donors,” but he’d be in his office at the Row Houses in the afternoons. In a couple of hours, then, I’ll return his damn book to him.
I fix a cup of tea, then stroll past the Magnolia Blossom, along a low stone wall where Ariyeh and I used to capture frogs after rain. I recall this neighborhood, in the early seventies, as lazy and quiet, buzzing with cicadas, the low purring of mourning doves, mockingbirds’ sneers. Doors remained open, always, offering odors of bacon and eggs, or ribs and potatoes in the evening; through them, you’d glimpse Bruce Lee posters on living room walls, platform shoes lined up in long hallways, people in dashikis sitting on the floor bobbing their heads to Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, or the hi hat hiss of Isaac Hayes’s “Shaft.” Now, every other door is boarded up, weeds choke windows. The air trembles to hip-hop.
Am I romanticizing, or were men more polite back then? They’d lean over and spit in the street gutters instead of directly on the sidewalk where people had to step. They’d look you in the eye and say hello. “Hi there, sister,” or “A salaam alaikum.”