The Love Children (12 page)

I sat up sharply. Was that true? Then Mom was sobbing, and in a little while, there was a chord, another voice sobbing with her, almost in harmony with her. Philo was crying with her!

I pictured the two of them, Philo lying across the foot of the bed the way he did when they talked, Mom leaning back against her pillows, Philo hugging her feet close to his body, then crawling up to hug her. Was she saying she didn't love Philo? I felt like crying myself, but then I had to laugh, what a family! The family that cries together stays together?

The sounds of that night lingered with me, and as time went on, it came to me that that was exactly what I wanted, someone who would feel with me, who would share my sorrow like that. I wondered if Steve would, or Bishop. I had never really asked much of them. I had thought before about asking Steve to give me something I needed. I knew I had given him what he needed; I became furious at our country when we talked about what happened to black people here, about the different things, terrible things that had happened to Steve and his friends. But nothing terrible had ever happened to me except my parents getting divorced, and I could hardly ask Steve to feel bad for me about that, when his mother had died when he was seven and his father didn't even want to know him. And by now I was used to my parents being divorced and in truth I didn't feel that bad about it anymore. Mostly what I felt bad about was Daddy, the way Daddy was. But if marrying Daddy made Mom not feel, what did it do to me to have parents who were always screaming at each other? Maybe I didn't feel anything either.

 

I was working the breakfast-and-lunch shift at Sonny's one Saturday when Steve stopped into the restaurant around two o'clock. He asked if I wanted to go to his place after work. He said his grandmother was going to visit her cousin in Roxbury and wouldn't be there, so I could finally see where he lived. I said sure
and he hung around until my shift ended at two thirty, which really meant almost three. I didn't want to show it, but I was very excited: I felt that this was a mark of serious trust. Steve had never taken me to his apartment before; he'd never even shown me where it was.

He drove us over toward MIT, where there were a lot of factories, nothing like Harvard. One of them was a yellow-brick twelve-story apartment building surrounded by a high chain-link fence and with a concrete yard, which looked like a prison yard, with no trees or flowers or grass. Children were playing in the yard, but they had no swings or seesaws or slide. The base of the building was covered with graffiti, most of it telling you to go fuck yourself. We opened a heavy brown door with a barred window in it and the letter
D
on it, entering a hall whose beige paint was almost completely obliterated by more graffiti. Garbage was scattered everywhere. There was a smell of urine and liquor and rotten food. We got on the elevator, which heaved its way up to the tenth floor. Steve held my hand all the way; I guess he knew I was nervous. It felt strange being in a place where people hate where they live so much that they scrawl “fuck you” on the walls and pee on the floor and strew garbage around. I'd read that animals never foul their own nests, so why would humans? I knew that a girl in Steve's building had had a baby last year and thrown it down the incinerator shaft. Steve had shown me the article in the paper, saying it had happened in his building. I figured the girl must have felt like garbage herself. Did the people who lived here think they were garbage? It made me want to cry. What had to happen to people to make them feel like garbage?

The hallways were concrete, painted light brown, the doors dark brown. Up here there wasn't so much graffiti. Once we were inside Steve's grandmother's apartment, I felt better. The living room had a beige couch and two green chairs and in front of the TV was a wooden rocking chair with a beige cushion. There
was an end table next to the couch and a standing lamp behind the rocker. Pictures of flowers cut from magazines were thumb-tacked to the walls, and nylon lace curtains hung at the windows. There was a statue of Jesus on the television set and a painting of him on one wall. The carpet had dark green leaves on a lighter green background. The walls were white. The color combination was nice.

“It's nice,” I said to Steve.

He smiled stiffly. I felt he didn't like my saying that. Maybe he thought I was patronizing him. Was I? Or maybe he thought I was surprised that it was nice. But I hadn't known what to expect. He had commented on our furniture the first time he came to my house. It had never occurred to me that our furniture was beautiful, just that it was old-fashioned. But he raved about it, said it was gorgeous. No way a black person could afford to buy antique furniture like ours, he said.

Steve's apartment had a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. His Grandma Josie's room had a double bed covered with a crocheted bedspread, an old bureau, a rocker, an old rag rug, and lace curtains. It was really nice, a quiet old-fashioned room where you could feel the peace. A photograph of what I guessed were her mother and father stood in a silver frame on her dresser; they looked incredibly old, wizened and nearly toothless. The boys' room was small and crowded, with two sets of bunk beds, one against each wall. There was a window at the back wall in the narrow space between them, with a sheer nylon curtain over it, and a blue shag rug on the floor. Their storage was in four big drawers, two in the base of each bed. The beds were covered in dark blue cotton bedspreads that I wondered if his grandma had made herself; they looked handmade. She had tried. You could see that. But the room stank. Well, three boys lived in it, two younger than Steve, and there were clothes everywhere, soiled underwear and smelly socks and sneakers. Books, balls, comic
books, little toy cars were scattered on the beds and floor. The closet door was open, showing coats and jeans and shirts hung precariously on crooked hangers and schoolbooks piled on the floor.

“She does the laundry on Sunday, her day off,” Steve said, as if he was embarrassed. Then he put his arms around me. I nestled against him, but I was a little uncomfortable in that room. I couldn't take the smell. I knew I was being snobbish, and I tried to get beyond myself. I reminded myself how terrific Steve was, what a great person, and how much I loved him. I relaxed a little.

We lay down on his bunk, the lower one on the right. Near our feet, a ladder leaned against the upper bunk, and we stared up at the board that held the mattress above us. We were lying on a thin mattress on a board too, so the bed was very hard. Probably good for the back, I thought.

We turned toward each other and started to kiss, and I got into it a little, I started feeling shoots of electricity, pangs, oh, I did love Steve, and he tried to slide my sweater off, and I had to help him, then we took off his sweater. He had on an undershirt and I had on a bra, and we had to get those off too. There wasn't much room in the bunk, and we started to giggle. I grabbed him and kissed him, he was so cute. All that undressing wore us out, but we still had to get off pants, with his belt, and his underpants. Getting those off was a real project, but we finally did it, we were down to our socks, but we didn't bother taking those off, we were hot now and pressed up against each other and our hearts were beating madly in among the clothes and I was moaning a little, and he was hard and big against my leg, and he started to pull his body up, and get on top of me, when we heard the front door open and slam shut.

We both fell back, aghast.

Steve looked at me, put a finger on his lips. We listened. We
could hear sounds, soft and slow. Not one of the boys. Steve heaved a great sigh. He pulled up his trousers and zipped them up. He put his sweater back on. His underwear lay mixed with mine amid the sheets. He got up silently and put on his shoes. He called out, “Gram? Josie?”

He went out into the living room and walked toward the kitchen. “Gram? What happened? Thought you were going to visit Eleanor.”

I heard an old woman's voice saying that Eleanor wasn't feeling well and didn't want company, so she just went to the grocery store. It sounded as if she was in the kitchen, putting groceries away. I could hear cupboard doors open and close. He stayed with her for a while, the two of them talking. Then she must have walked into the living room. I heard the TV switch on. I heard a body settle itself into an armchair.

“Umm, there's a girl in the bedroom, Gram,” Steve said. I could hear him better now they were in the next room.

“A girl? In the bedroom?”

“Yeah. Jess. My friend from school. I was showing her the apartment and she started to feel sick, so she lay down.”

“Well, I can't take care of her, Steven,” she said, sounding alarmed. “You better take her home.”

“No, no, I know. As soon as she's feeling better, I will.”

“All right, boy.”

A game show took over the living room. Steve suddenly appeared in the bedroom. He smiled at me. “How you feeling?”

I rolled my eyes at him.

“Better? Don't get up till you feel better, y'hear?”

I grimaced and felt around for my underwear. I couldn't find my bra.

“Where's my bra?” I mouthed at him. He put his hand over his mouth, stifling a laugh, and came over to the bed to look around.
Between us, we found it, tangled in the sheet. He helped me put it on. We found the rest of my clothes and I struggled into them, still lying there. Finally I got up. I started to make the bed.

“Don't bother,” he whispered.

“A sick person would leave a bed looking like this?” I hissed into his ear.

He laughed so hard you could hear him, and he said, out loud, “I'm glad you're feeling better, Jess.”

We pulled the sheet neatly over the mattress, pulled the blanket and spread up to where it might have been. Then we tried to leave the room, but Steve had to wait a minute to stop laughing and calm himself.

We went out into the living room. “Gram, this is Jess. Jess, this is my Gramma Josie,” Steve said, smiling.

Josie turned her head and stared at me—and froze. Her face changed, her color changed, her whole body changed. She looked at me, then at Steve. Then she turned away from us, her head moving very slowly. The image hung before me, her old worn face, its grooves deep with sorrow, her eyes empty, their life gone.

“I don't know what you think you're doing, boy,” she said, tonelessly.

We stood there, transfixed. Then Steve took my hand and led me out, and wordlessly we went back down in the elevator and got in his car, and wordlessly he drove me home.

 

My senior year I waited tables at the café, but only breakfasts and lunches. Sonny wanted guys to work the dinner shift; he thought it was classier, and of course the guys liked it because dinner had the best tips. I was always off after three and often shopped for my family. I tried to buy things I knew Philo liked. Mom and I liked almost everything, but Philo didn't—he was used to a different diet and he didn't care much for unusual vegetables or fish or salads, so we reserved them for nights he wasn't there. His mother
was a wonderful cook, he said, and she cooked the specialties of her own country, spicy meatballs he couldn't describe beyond to say they were delicious, and chicken or veal with paprika.

“Ummm,” Mom said, “can you get me the recipes?”

He looked at her falteringly.

“Just ask your mother. Jot them down. I'd love to try them.”

He sat there blinking.

“Philo! What's the matter? Is that so hard?”

“She won't give them to me,” he finally wrenched out.

“Good heavens, why not?”

He wouldn't meet her eyes.

Now she was really curious. “What is it, Fi?”

“She wouldn't give me a recipe to give you,” he said.

“Why not?”

His teeth barely moved. “She thinks you're a bad woman.”

“Oh.” I could see that many things became clear for my mother in that instant. Her brow clouded.

Philo watched her miserably. “I'm sorry, Andy. She's old-fashioned.”

“So that's why we haven't met your family,” she said. Her mouth was tight.

“Yes.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“No.”

Mom burst out laughing then, and I breathed out.

 

In the spring of 1971, a lot of bad things happened. In March we found out about the My Lai massacre. It had happened a couple of years before, and some people had known about it earlier, but most of us found out about it then. The military was blaming a soldier named Calley. I felt bad for him: maybe he had been a killer that day, but that's what he'd been trained to do—he was just a boy who had been turned into a weapon, doing what
his superiors told him to do. He wasn't like Eichmann, an educated man with connections who would know how to transfer himself out of an untenable situation. He was a grunt. Killing those people certainly hadn't been his own idea. My friends and I thought there should be a court somewhere to put the president, the head of the army, the secretary of defense, and the secretary of state on trial. Everybody was disgusted with the war and with our leaders, but no one seemed to think we could do anything about them.

Nixon was ordering a lot of bombing and there was a protest in Washington by soldiers who had fought in Vietnam. Men who had been acclaimed heroes threw their medals back at the government, saying they had suffered and killed for nothing. The government was slowly, almost silently bringing men back from Vietnam, but in the middle of June, there was a huge explosion after the
New York Times
published the papers taken from the Pentagon that showed that the government had been giving covert assistance to Vietnam since 1954. The papers showed how useless American efforts—the sacrifice of the limbs and lives of the men like the ones who had thrown back their medals—had been. All these things made us sick. We were sick about being Americans, responsible for these horrors.