The Warmest December (21 page)

It was out, she’d said it. She thought I was doing things I knew I wasn’t ready for yet. Sex. Jonas and I kissed and petted, but that was it. I was wounded by her accusation and my eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, please!” she said in disgust when the first tear streaked down my check. “Those tears do not move me, Kenzie, not one damn bit!” She slammed the half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray and then immediately lit another one.

“I oughta tell your father, that’s what I should do!”

I shook at the thought. “But Mom—” I began, but her hand came up, cutting my words into shreds of air.

“You know I wasn’t all for this boarding school thing, but now, now I’m all for it.” She set her eyes on me and gave me a look that I’d seen passed between women on crowded buses when hips collided and tempers flared. “Get outta my face, Kenzie, and—oh, you are not to leave this house for the next week and no phone calls either.”

I stood there with my mouth open. What had I done? What crime had I committed?

I stalked into my room and remained there until the next day.

She must have said something to Hy-Lo, maybe in passing or early in the day when he’d just come in from work, his mind still clear and the seal still unbroken on the bottle of vodka. They were able to converse then, like married couples on television, easy unhurried speech that was sprinkled with light laughter and calm interludes. Or maybe she’d spoken in her sleep, mumbling her anger into the softness of her pillow. Whatever the case, he found out and began to watch me.

The questions didn’t begin for a few days, although I knew they were lingering there on the tip of his tongue. And then the day came when the words toppled out of his mouth, sending me reeling.

“Are you still a virgin?” He asked it as if he’d practiced the question in front of his bedroom mirror.

“What?” I said blinking in shock.

“Don’t
what
me. Are you still a virgin?” he repeated.

I was wounded. What the hell was with them and this sex thing? I was thirteen years old and didn’t know anyone who had actually done it. Glenna almost did, but then she chickened out. At least she’d actually seen a penis; I hadn’t seen one since Malcolm had been potty-trained. “What—I mean, excuse me?” I said stupidly, not quite sure how to answer him and make him believe me.

“Are you hard of hearing now?” He was sitting on the sofa, his cup on the floor beside his foot, a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the end table by the couch.

“Um, no, I just—um. Yes, I’m still a virgin,” I blurted. My mouth went dry as the heat of embarrassment spread through my body.

“Yeah, well, I’m going to take you to the doctor to make sure.” His eyes searched my face for any tick or shift that would indicate a lie.

My face was a stone block and I turned and walked away. “I will do it, Kenzie. I will,” he said to my back and laughed.

The towels came two days after his threat. Large bodyconsuming towels that were blinding white. Seven of them, one for each day of the week. I was to use only those towels and no one else in the house was to touch them.

He brought them in two large plastic bags that had the name
SEARS
in black letters on the sides. “Here,” he said and shoved the bags at me.

Delia was there, ironing and folding Hy-Lo’s clothes. The only piece of his clothing she didn’t iron was his socks. “Oh, those are nice.” She was speaking with a lisp; her lip was swollen.

I didn’t even ask her why he’d gone and bought those towels for me. We had too many towels in the house as it was. The cedar chest bulged with towels and face cloths. It was an obsession for him: linens and liquor.

I followed the rules and used one towel every day, until a lightbulb finally went off in my head as I stood drying myself.

I was on the sixth set of towels by then. The others had either begun to fray around the edges or go yellow from extensive washing and overbleaching. These seven were brand new, I could tell by how they felt against my skin and the easy anxious way the fibers absorbed the water beads.

Hy-Lo just replaced them every year. Threw out the old ones, didn’t even shred them for dusting rags like he did everything else, just packed them into one of those large black hefty bags and set them out by the trash.

I wiped at my skin and sang along to a song that played softly from my radio. I wiped at the water beneath my breasts and off my stomach, slowly moving down my thighs and then finally between my legs.

I lifted the towel to mop off some forgotten water from my shoulder and saw the red streaks of blood there. I remembered being more disgusted at having gotten my period just as I was about to go to the beach than at the bloodstains that ruined the snow-white appearance of my towel.

Maybe it was the combination of disappointment and the crimson streaks that finally delivered the answer to a question I had never asked, but I knew then why he had bought me those white towels: that was his calendar, his way of keeping tabs on my monthly.

I stuffed all seven towels in a big plastic hefty bag and set them out by the garbage.

I would never use another white towel, ever.

My week of imprisonment seemed to take a million years to pass. I spent hours staring out my window, running my hand up and down my forearm imagining it was Jonas’s fingers, not mine, that gently stroked my skin.

I was in love for the first time and it pained and pleasured me in equal measure. Over that week I decided I did not want to leave Jonas. What would I do without his tender kisses and his soothing words?

We were the same, he and I, and it had taken me my whole young life to find him. I would not let him go so easily.

“Mom.” I approached Delia as she walked through the door from work.

“Yes, Kenzie,” she responded as she glanced at the clock.

I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject. I waited while my nerves took hold of themselves.

“Yes, Kenzie,” she said again and looked directly into my eyes. We had not spoken for the majority of the week. No idle chitchat about her job or the people on the block. She had nothing to say to me outside of “Turn down that music” or “Wash that cup.”

The mood between us was frigid and Malcolm steered clear to avoid the icy edges that surrounded us.

“I—I was thinking that maybe I—uh, well, I don’t think that I—” I was stammering, struggling to pull the right words from within.

“Spit it out, Kenzie, I have to get dinner started.” She glanced at the clock again and looked at me in frustration. “C’mon, girl, say it.”

“I don’t want to go away to school.” I blurted it out and my legs turned to Jell-O.

Delia hadn’t even flinched at my announcement. She just smiled and shook her head. “And why is that?” she asked.

Something inside told me she knew what I was going to say. “I just don’t,” I said quietly.

“Hmmm,” Delia responded and walked into the kitchen. I heard the strike of the match and then the open and close of the refrigerator door. Cigarette smoke sailed out into the living room and circled my head before fading into the darkness. “Come here, Kenzie,” Delia called to me after ten minutes or so.

When I walked into the kitchen she was seated at the table smoking. Two pots boiled and bubbled behind her on the stove and a head of lettuce sat glistening in the sink. She motioned for me to take the seat across from her.

“I was your age not too long ago. I had very few opportunities. Very few.” She inhaled on her cigarette and I could tell she was thinking back. “Anyway,” she said and shook her head as if trying to shake those memories away. “You have an opportunity to go away to school, to be exposed to something other than what these streets have to offer.”

She said the streets, but I knew she meant Jonas.

“You may feel something for that boy, but there will be a hundred other boys in your life that will make you feel the same way. You are only thirteen, you’re still a baby.”

Delia’s words were soft and her eyes shone with understanding, but with every word she spoke, my heart hardened against her.

“It has nothing to do with any boys, Mom.” My voice was filled with impatience. “I just want to stay here and go to school with my friends,” I lied.

“Uh-huh, well, I’m sorry, Kenzie, you can’t do that.” Her voice was still soft but there was an unmistakable hardness around the edges.

“But it’s my decision,” I said. My whole body stiffened with anger.

“Not anymore, Kenzie.”

Our eyes locked and I fought to control the tears that threatened to come like floodwaters.

Jonas and I continued, as though our lives depended on our being together. There was two weeks left to the summer and then I would be gone.

“What kind of school is it?” he asked as we lazed beneath a grand oak in Prospect Park. My head rested in his lap and he stroked my eyebrows with the tip of his forefinger.

I don’t know why I lay my head there. Maybe because dozens of couples around me were doing it and I felt a need to imitate it. At first I felt awkward having my face so close to his crotch, but then his words began to fill my ears, and the clouds, soft and full, moved across the sky, and I forgot all about the member that lurked there.

“Private. Girls,” I said. I did not want to talk about it; the novelty of it had worn off a long time ago.

“My mom’s giving a party on the fifth. Her birthday. You should come, it’ll be like a going-away party for you.”

I didn’t answer right away. I was enjoying the clouds, sun, and the late-August breeze that sent the blades of grass waving. I was thirteen and my whole life was ahead of me. I was thirteen and my whole life was keeping my head propped toward the sky.

“Why not,” I said and closed my eyes.

I did not have permission to be there. But I’d told a lie. Lying was becoming natural for me. Where I once stuttered and stammered my way through a lie, those words of deceit now flowed from my mouth like mother’s milk. “I’m going to stay over at Glenna’s,” I told my mother. I did a lot of that too, telling instead of asking.

Delia looked at me, searched my face for fraud, and found nothing. I was a blank wall and my eyes never wavered beneath her watchful eye. “Okay,” she said and dismissed me with a wave of her hand and a puff of smoke.

Glenna told Pinky that we were headed to the movies. A bunch of us were going to see a kung fu flick on Eastern Parkway. “Double feature?” Pinky eagerly asked as she dabbed perfume behind her ears.

“Uh-huh.” We both nodded our heads and walked out the door.

It was just past eight when we arrived at Jonas’s door. Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” filled the hallway. Loud laughter and carefree conversation bounced off the other side of the door just before it swung open.

Ms. Murphy, Jonas’s mother, greeted us. “Hello,” she said. Her eyes were slits and she held a glass of gin in one hand. “J, your little friends are here.”

Glenna stifled a laugh and gave me a comical look. “She looks like a—”

“I know,” I said cutting her off.

“Hey.” Jonas stood before us. He had on a pair of blue Lee’s and a white and blue pinstriped shirt. The crease in his pants probably took all day and half a can of starch to put there. His Adidas sneakers had been scrubbed clean, but he’d forgotten to wash the laces. They were a dusty gray and stood out like an eyesore on the burnished white leather.

“Hey,” I said back to him. Glenna said the same thing and then we just stood there for a moment staring at each other.

“You look nice.” His eyes traveled over my body. I wore a red tube top and black Lee’s with clear jelly shoes that showed off my painted red toes.

“Thanks,” I said and Glenna snickered.

“Close my goddamn door, J!” Ms. Murphy yelled from the background.

The apartment was small, just a one-bedroom, with a bathroom and kitchen. The living room was barely the size of my bedroom, yet she had enough people jammed in there to fill two apartments.

“Y’all got jobs?” Ms. Murphy slurred at Glenna and me.

“No,” we said together and looked at Jonas.

“Oh, okay, otherwise you’d hafta pay like everyone else.”

She coughed and then laughed and stumbled away to a tight crowd of people near the kitchen.

Jonas shook his head in embarrassment. We stood there in the midst of the music and paper plates filled with greasy chicken wings, coleslaw, and fried corn. We said nothing for a long time, just took in everything around us.

It was my first grown-up party outside the family gatherings. During those the children were confined to a bedroom, often stretched across an aunt’s bed fighting with the guest coats, or shoved into a cousin’s dank basement with a bowl of popcorn and a few cans of soda.

Now I stood beneath a blue light while droves of adults moved around me, counting me as one of them, not noticing at all that I could have been one of their own children out on a lie.

The scent of reefer moved through the air and tickled at our noses. Glenna and I smiled at each other and lifted our heads and inhaled deeply. We moved further into the deep blue-blackness of the apartment, sidestepping swaying arms, jutting hipbones, and bobbing behinds. It was like walking into a living cave.

Someone shoved a beer into my hand, and before I could politely refuse it a short bald man with big eyes and a potbelly grabbed my arm and swung me around. “C’mon, sweet thang, you wanna dance wit me?”

I tried to object but he was already pulling me toward the sea of people bumping and grinding their way through “Love Is the Message.”

“No thank y—” I was in the midst of it before I or anyone else could save me. I looked desperately toward Glenna and then Jonas, but neither of them made a move.

“C’mon, c’mon.” The man before me had my free hand, swaying my arm back and forth as if it had some instant connection with my feet. “How you young people do it?” he said and did an awkward spin.

I laughed and popped the tab to the beer can. My feet began to move, stiff at first, and then I took a sip of the beer and picked up on the rhythm, allowing myself to be carried by the music. My feet shuffled and slid across the tired wooden floor as I allowed myself to let loose.