The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (4 page)

“I can see everything from here,” she said. It was an honest answer that I couldn’t argue with.

When Naomi came into the store on her own, she became what almost all children want to be: stubbornly independent. She pushed the door open with both hands, her feet running in place behind her until it gradually began to give. Once inside, she took a swipe at a piece of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes, and as she stood there in light gray slacks and a frilly button-down blue shirt, it was possible to see for a second at least one of the women I imagine she’s going to become.

She walked through the store as if she knew where everything was already. Up one aisle and then down the other, until she had plodded her way through them all, without so much as glancing at any of the items on the shelves. When she came down the last aisle, she did so with her gaze firmly fixed on the floor, her feet clomping heavily with each step as if she were determined to crush the tile beneath her. She walked right past the counter and straight to the door, which she again struggled with in the same determined manner for a few seconds, and then she was gone. Had she not left a trail of muddy footprints down the aisle, I might not have believed she had ever been there, so quickly and resolutely did she pass through.

Minutes later, Judith came running into the store by herself, just as well dressed as her daughter, except for her hair, which lay tossed to the side in a stringy mess. She scanned the aisles quickly before turning and yelling to me, “Have you seen Naomi?”

I told her what had just happened, and before I finished she was off. I grabbed my keys, locked the door, and left. Before I took even a dozen steps outside, though, I heard Judith’s voice yelling and crying at the same time: “Stop doing this! Never, ever do this again!”

She and Naomi were in the alley right around the corner. Judith was on her knees, shaking Naomi by the shoulders, while her daughter just stood there, visibly indifferent to what her mother was saying. I watched them silently from a few feet away. Tears had begun to stream down Judith’s face as she shook and yelled at her daughter. When Judith finally gave in and embraced her, I turned around and went back to my store.

Later that afternoon, Judith came back and offered what I could tell had become a routine apology for her. She repeated the words as if she were reading them from a manual: “I’m sorry about what happened this afternoon. Naomi can be difficult. Thanks for all your help.”

“That’s okay,” I told her. “I used to run away all the time when I was a child.”

She smiled back gratefully at me. If there was one thing I understood about people, it was how far even the smallest gesture of sympathy could go when needed.

“And how did your mom get you to stop?”

“She didn’t. That’s how I ended up here.”

She gave a slight, courteous laugh for the attempt.

“Normally she just hides in some corner of the house when she gets upset. But every once in a while she manages to escape before I can stop her.”

“Have you thought of chains?”

“Illegal.”

“How about a cage?”

“Still illegal.”

“Sleeping pills?”

“Tylenol PM count?”

“Close enough.”

“Then yes.”

Judith and Naomi became regulars at my store after that day. In a new house, in a new neighborhood, it became a safe, familiar place for the both of them for one reason only: Naomi had picked it as the place to be seen. The hideously green tiled floors and the bad fluorescent lighting, the five tightly packed aisles could, if seen often enough, or through the right eyes, have an air of warmth to them. Of at least that I was certain.

If it was early enough in the afternoon, Judith let Naomi come to the store alone. Our first few tries at conversation were awkward and painful. We missed each other completely.

“How do you like your new neighborhood?” I asked her.

“Why do you always ask me questions?” she asked me. She turned her back on me then and pretended to browse through the aisles of cheap processed foods, none of which she would ever need. After that she left and didn’t come back for two days. But we persevered. We progressed in stages. The next time Naomi came to the store, she walked straight over to the map of Africa I kept taped on the wall.

“Do you know what that is?” I asked her.

She shook her head in contempt and didn’t say a word. Of course she knew, and I was made a fool for asking. I showed her where Ethiopia was and put my finger on the star that marked the capital. I told her that was where I was from and where my mother and brother still lived.

“Do you have a picture of them?” she asked me.

“Only one old one.”

“That’s not good,” she said. “You should have more. Don’t you miss them?”

“Yes, I do,” I told her. “But I try not to.”

She stared at me with her wide eyes and blinked twice.

Naomi began coming to the store more often after that day. By the middle of November she was coming at least three times a week, more often five or six. She came straight from school or early on a Saturday morning. Some afternoons she simply stood next to the register and rocked back and forth on her heels while chewing a piece of gum. On other days she read pink paperback novels whose plots she summarized for me in a hundred words or less. I gave her little packages of candy to save for later, and I could tell by the way she quickly tucked them into her pockets without ever reading the label that was precisely what she did. In exchange for the candy, Naomi reported to me the whole wide world as it came to her every day.

“I saw this kid getting beat up in the alley yesterday.”

“Two guys were kissing each other on the mouth near the park.”

“There was this boy down the block peeing in front of someone’s house.”

“The old woman that lives next door to us was sweeping the street this morning.”

Kids pushed and beat one another up on almost every block; they flashed gang signs, shouted insults, and made threats. Nothing, however, seemed to alarm Naomi, and when she told me what she had seen, she did so without fear or hesitation, as if she already knew that the only way to live was to take all of the things you saw at face value.

When I asked her questions, she always just shrugged her shoulders and came up with a one-word answer.

“How was school today?”

“Fine.”

“How’s your mom?”

“Fine.”

“What’s fine about her?”

“Everything.”

“What did you learn today?”

“Nothing.”

“You mean the entire day, your teacher taught you nothing new? Not a single fact, or word?”

“Nope.”

“You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?”

“Yup.”

With each “nope” or “yup” she made sure to drag out the vowel so she could pop her lips hard on that final consonant.

We read the newspaper together, which was her way of showing me how smart she was. Naomi was eleven years old, and she took pride in being able to shake her head at the world. She was convinced that American foreign policy in the Middle East was a failure, that a two-state solution in Israel was inevitable, and that enough wasn’t being done about the global AIDS crisis. She tucked and folded the creases in the
Washington Post
with an agility fitting an old man, and even the way she leaned against the counter, her head resting on her chin as she thumbed her way through the articles, spoke of a wisdom that seemed to belong more to her mother than to her.

“You know, kids shouldn’t talk like that,” I told her once.

She shrugged her shoulders again, letting her eyes drop to the floor in a way that seemed rehearsed.

“I know,” she said. “But I’m not a kid.”

“What are you, then?”

“I’m an adult.”

“You’re eleven.”

“And how old are you?”

“A lot older.”

“So what’s your point? I’m supposed to be stupid until I’m a lot older?”

“Exactly. Why do you think people like kids so much?”

One afternoon we ran out of things to talk about, so we invented some. By the end of Naomi’s time in the store that day, we had created an entire alternate universe populated exclusively with animals. The world was made simply enough. Standing in front of the register, her elbows just barely perched on the counter, Naomi had done what she did best. She commanded.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

I remember looking at her and wondering where that instinct to dictate came from. She was too young for almost everything she said and did, and yet when given the chance, she seized every moment of childishness that I could offer her. Judith had struck me as deliberate and patient in every one of her actions, while Naomi acted only on desire, indifferent to consequences and pitfalls, free of restraint.

She slumped her head down into her folded arms and gazed at me with those wide, comic eyes of hers, and for the first time since meeting her I wished that she were mine entirely.

“What kind of story?” I asked her.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Something funny?”

She nodded.

“What else?” I asked her.

“There should be animals,” she said.

“What kind?”

“You pick.”

“A monkey?” I asked her.

“Two monkeys,” she said.

“Okay. Two monkeys. What do they do?”

“They own a store.”

“What kind of store?”

“A big one.”

And so, from the beginning, even the animals were a few steps ahead of me. The two monkeys, whom we never had to name, had the largest grocery store for miles. They had a house on the lake, stocks, cars, and more friends than they knew what to do with. They threw lavish parties and were the toast of the jungle. Most important, they had Henry the chauffeur. He bled into our lives immediately. Some afternoons, he was all we talked about.

“Henry’s taking me to the movies tonight,” Naomi would say.

“He was just here,” I would tell her.

“Was he looking for me?”

“Of course. I think he was even a bit sad when he left.”

Henry drove us to concerts and plays, and on occasion to the summer homes we created for ourselves along the coast. Once he forgot to pick Naomi up from school, which was why, she explained, she hadn’t been able to see me that day.

“Henry,” she said, “messed up big time.”

Henry was responsible for the broken radiator in my store one afternoon. He was responsible for the dwindling supply of candy one week. On better days he gave us advice on our taxes, suggested investments, brokered deals, and when life turned unexpectedly, bore the brunt of our failures and mistakes, our disappointments, accidents, mishaps, frustrations, and angers.

The only rule Judith had for Naomi was that she always had to be home before five, just as the early winter sun was beginning to set. Judith picked that hour because it had been at roughly that time of day that a young man had approached her on her way home from my store and asked her if she liked to suck black dick. As she was walking past General Logan, the young man pulled out his penis and then broke out in laughter and went running back to his friends, who were watching from the benches only a few feet away.

“It wasn’t scary,” Judith said. “Just humiliating. Which is maybe even worse.”

If Naomi wasn’t home by four-thirty, Judith came to the store to pick her up. How long Naomi stayed was always a matter of her own choice. On the afternoons I was busy she left almost as soon as she arrived. “You’re boring,” she would tell me, and she would leave angry, or she would stay until the last possible moment, eager to do anything except return to her mother. Judith not only tolerated her daughter’s fierceness, she loved her all the more for it.

“You know, I keep wondering what I would have done if Naomi had been there when that kid came up to me. I keep thinking that she would have handled it better than I did.”

How Judith handled it was by turning around and walking slowly past her house until she found a bus stop, where she sat and cried for just a minute.

“I told myself that if I looked determined enough, he couldn’t touch me. My hands were shaking so hard I had to clasp them in front of me while I walked. I could hear him laughing with his friends for about a block, and then they just stopped and moved on.”

We had all of our conversations in front of Naomi, with Judith on one side of the counter and me on the other, Naomi sitting on a stool somewhere in between the two of us. She was looking through the real-estate ads in the back of the
Washington Post
’s Sunday magazine while Judith told me about the incident.

“I would have kicked him where it counts,” Naomi said, her eyes still supposedly focused on the ads.

“I don’t doubt for a second that you would have, honey.”

“Why did he say that to you?”

“I don’t know. I think he thought it was all just a joke.”

Judith leaned over and caressed her daughter’s hair. “We should go. It’s getting late,” she said.

“You want me to walk you home?”

“No. We’re fine. Plus, I got my little kickboxer with me.”

Naomi let her mother pick her up off her stool, and she even let her hold her for almost a minute before she wriggled herself free. It was six-thirty on a Friday night—late and dark enough to have brought out a few of the kids who would settle onto the corner for the rest of the evening. The two of them walked out of my store hand in hand, past a few snickers and “Psssssts” and “Heys” as if they were oblivious to everything besides each other.

3

K
enneth calls me at home early the next morning just as I’m about to leave my apartment.

“Why aren’t you at the store yet?” he asks me. It’s the first thing he says, and the only reason he called to begin with. He’s been calling me at least once a week since April. He calls me at home early in the morning, or at the store in the middle of the day to see if I’m performing my shopkeeper duties, first and foremost of which is to be open. Now that it’s May, he seems determined to let me know that I can expect more of the same from him. In the background I can hear other phones ringing and a low rumble of indistinguishable voices. I’ve never been to Kenneth’s office, but I imagine a busy row of men in identical suits picking and hanging up their phones in unison.