Anita sang:
I’d like to know that your love
Is love I can be sure of.
So, tell me now and I won’t ask again,
Will you still love me tomorrow?
Cassandra parked on 12th Street a few doors down from Gladys’s house. She decided to leave the car there for the night and return it to her brother-in-law in the morning. Gladys went home, and the three girls went on up Clifton toward 13th Street. They were about halfway up the block when a little boy ran past them coming from 13th. “Rhonda’s been shot!” he shouted to no one in particular. “Rhonda’s been killed!” The three all knew the boy as the biggest liar in the world. He was followed by his mother, who carried a switch as long as the boy. “You better stop!” the mother hollered. “You just gonna make it worse when I catch you!” The girls laughed.
The chaos on 13th Street began at the corner, with dozens of people standing from the corner up to Rhonda’s house in the middle of the block. The girls could see that 13th Street was blocked off from Clifton to Euclid. There were five or so police cars parked every which way about the street. One had come onto the sidewalk and was facing the low stone wall at Rhonda’s place. Cassandra had begun walking faster after she turned the corner and crossed 13th Street, pushing her way violently through the crowd. Anita held on to her back, and Melanie held Anita’s back. Anita’s mother was standing a few feet from the front of Rhonda’s house where two policemen, unsmiling, arms folded, stood as if they would never again do anything as important. One kept telling people, “Get back, get back.”
“Mama, what happened?” Anita said.
“Jeffrey shot Rhonda,” her mother said. “Jeffrey killed Rhonda.”
“You shouldn’t say that,” Cassandra said. She began calling Rhonda’s name. She called her friend’s entire name, even the two middle ones, which Rhonda hated. There were plainclothesmen in the yard and even more in the house. All the lights in the house seemed to be on, and Cassandra could see the strange men on the first floor and in the basement walking by the windows and talking among themselves. She called Rhonda’s name. Nothing seemed real, not the buzzing of the crowd, not that house lit up from top to bottom as if for a party.
“Honey, it’s true,” Anita’s mother said to Cassandra and took the girl by the arm. Cassandra continued to call. At any moment the hated middle names would bring Rhonda, pretending to be angry, to the window.
“This is Rhonda’s best friend, Mama,” Anita said.
A woman next to Anita’s mother said, “He just shot her for no reason at all. I was playin out there with my grandbaby and I could see her practicin in the basement.” Cassandra stepped toward the policemen with the folded arms and one told her, “Get back, get back.” “He shot her and then just came out here and sat down on the steps,” the woman said, “like he was waitin for a ride to come pick him up.”
Rhonda’s father was a very thrifty man, and had he been there, Cassandra knew, had his daughter been in the basement, alive and practicing, all those lights would not have been on. Melanie took Cassandra’s other arm and began to cry. They took Cassandra back through the crowd and across the street to Clifton Terrace, where Anita lived. Melanie, still crying, hugged the three women, then, as if she had forgotten what she had just done, she hugged Cassandra twice more and went home.
Anita’s father and brother were playing chess at the kitchen table when they came in. Anita and her mother took Cassandra into the girl’s room. Cassandra sat on the bed with her hands in her lap and looked out the window. Anita stood at the foot of the bed, one arm around the bedpost, looking down at Cassandra. An eyeless and very old teddy bear leaning back against her bed pillows had fallen over when Cassandra sat down. The ticking of the Big Ben clock Anita’s grandfather had given her was the loudest sound in the room. In the kitchen, her brother was proclaiming victory over their father for only the third or fourth time in the boy’s life. Beyond her window Anita could see the twinkling lights of Washington.
Anita’s mother came in and gave Cassandra a cup of cocoa sitting in a saucer.
“I got to be goin…I got to be goin to home,” Cassandra whispered, saying bome as if it were a foreign word. Anita told her to drink. Anita watched as her mother helped Cassandra off with her clothes and into one of her mother’s nightgowns.
She made a pallet for her daughter beside the bed and turned out the light when she left the room. Occasionally, Cassandra would drift into what Anita thought was sleep. All the while Cassandra gritted her teeth. Sometime way late in the night, Cassandra spoke out, and at first Anita thought she was talking in her sleep: She asked Anita to sing that song she had sung in the car on the way home. Anita sang; long after her parents had gone to bed, long after she stopped wondering if Cassandra was listening, Anita sang. She sang on into the night for herself alone, her voice pushing back everything she did not yet understand.
YOUNG LIONS
He stood naked before the open refrigerator in the darkened kitchen, downing the last of the milk in a half-gallon carton. Carol, once again, had taped a note to the carton. Caesar Matthews did not have to read it to know that it told him she loved him with all her heart, or that she would miss him all that day. She used to pin such notes to her pillow before she went off in the morning, leaving him still asleep. But in the night, when she brushed her hair as she prepared for bed, she would find the notes still pinned to the pillow, undisturbed and so perhaps unread. So now she taped them to milk cartons, for he could not begin his day without drinking milk, or she taped them to his gold key ring, or pinned them to the zippers of the expensive pants she knew he would wear that day. In more than two years, the wording on the notes had not changed very much. Sometimes, when he thought of it, he would fold the paper with the words and place it on the kitchen table between the salt and pepper shakers, to let her know he had come upon it before he ventured out.
This morning, after he had finished the last of the milk, without reading the words, he tossed the carton in a high arc across the room into the trash can. He pulled up the window shade and let in the morning light. He was anxious to be out in the streets; there was nothing like an empty apartment to bring down the soul.
The night before, for the fourth time in a week, he had dreamed about the retarded woman. Sherman would have told him such dreams were a good sign. Caesar was left now with only fragments of the dreams, the splintered memory that he had been roaming about in some foreign land, and the retarded woman had been standing among tall trees in that land. She never seemed to be hiding, as she should have been, but appeared to wave to him. He could not remember anything after she waved. He did remember with certainty that in all the dreams the woman was known to him not as being retarded but as being feeble-minded, which was the phrase his father had always used.
He was still naked when the telephone rang, standing at the bathroom door wondering if he wanted a shower. “These are the times,” Carol would have joked, “when we miss our mothers most.”
Manny, on the telephone, asked if he wanted to tend bar that evening and make some change. “I was about to hop over your place,” Caesar said. He never liked Manny Soto calling his apartment, for Manny always whispered on the phone and made each word he spoke sound obscene. “He talk that way cause he’s a fence and every other bad thing in the world,” Sherman had said once. “He think people are listenin to everything he says, and maybe by whisperin, they’ll hear a little less.”