The Warmest December (8 page)

I walked quickly past the bodega and Mei-Mei’s Chinese takeout, trying to keep the pace the brisk fingers of wind had set for me as she pushed me up the street toward the bus stop. We danced there, the wind and I, until the bus came and I looked up and into the judicious eyes of the driver.

He watched me the whole time, his eyes shifting like a pendulum between the street and me. I crossed my legs and wished I hadn’t taken a seat so close to the front. I looked out the window and then down at my hands. I uncrossed my legs and wished I had a magazine to flip through. I glanced up and his eyes looked dead into mine.

Did he know me? Did he remember me from those nights when Malcolm, Delia, and I climbed on board his bus, tired and beaten. I peered hard at those brown eyes and wondered.

He looked at the street and then back at me.

Was that shame I saw glistening there—pity in those swimming brown pools for eyes he had?

He looked at the street and then back at me.

I got up and rang the bell. I would walk the rest of the way home.

Home. A one-bedroom apartment in a housing project with shadowy halls that smelled of urine and whatever it was the woman on the second floor cooked that night.

I stepped over the garbage that someone had dumped in front of the doorway and checked behind me twice to make sure that I was entering the building alone. I laughed to myself, laughed at the irony of the situation; we had ended up in the very same place Delia had tried to avoid for most of her life. The projects.

Eastman Projects was just one step away from the staterun shelters. The families that lived in the Eastman Projects had lost more than their homes; they’d lost their spirit, dignity, and sometimes their sanity.

The accounting firm where Delia had worked for most of her adult life had been sold twice, finally management decided to reorganize, and no matter how they shifted their numbers, Delia just no longer seemed to figure into the budget. “I got two kids,” she’d said when her boss pulled her into his office to give her the news. “Isn’t there
something
I can do?” she’d asked and wiped at the tears that were forming in her eyes.

Her boss, he simply adjusted his yellow and green striped tie, shrugged his shoulders, and shook his head. Delia got six weeks’ severance pay and a bouquet of flowers with a card that said:
Good luck, we’ll miss you!

Me, I just couldn’t hold a job. I could hold a bottle, but I found jobs to be slippery, hard to hang on to.

When the bank foreclosed on the house, we had nowhere to go, and so Delia and I went to the welfare office, signed our names on long white sheets of paper, and sat among dozens of other men and women like ourselves, waiting for our names to be called. “Lowe, Kenzie!” “Lowe, Delia!”

Mr. Chang. He had only been a caseworker for three months. Fresh out of college. Clean-cut, straight teeth, nice nails. His desk was still uncluttered, the people who sat before him were still people and not just case numbers. He drank mineral water out of the bottle and listened when they spoke.

Delia and I left there with one hundred dollars in food stamps and a letter for emergency housing at Eastman.

We would see Mr. Chang six months later for recertification. I noticed his skin had lost its glow and his attention span was a bit short. He still smiled though, even if it seemed forced. The third time I saw him, his desk was a mess of papers and half-empty coffee cups. He smelled of cigarette smoke and something else I couldn’t put my finger on. His eyes were bloodshot and he had developed a nailbiting habit. He still smiled, even though it was strained and looked more like a crazed grin than a smile. My fourth visit, I was assigned a new caseworker. Mr. Chang had gone to work in the private sector.

I rounded the corner and started toward the elevator. Two men, boys really, stood huddled near the entranceway of the elevator. One boy was tall and dark with a long thin scar that ran the length of his cheek. He wore a bright orange baseball cap and an army fatigue jacket. He had one Timberland boot–covered foot cocked up against the door of the elevator, propping it open for the light while he counted the roll of five- and ten-dollar bills he held in his hands. The other boy was smaller, just as dark, and wore a tattered brown leather jacket that hung too big on his small frame; he sported two diamond studs in his ear. They both looked up as I approached.

“Hey, girl,” Orange Baseball Cap called out to me.

I nodded and said hello and even forced a smile. I had to be congenial if nothing else. “Hey,” I said back and tried to tear my eyes away from the money. I considered turning around and moving toward the stairway, but the risk was too great. “Hey,” I said again and nodded my head toward the elevator.

“Take the fucking stairs,” Brown Leather Jacket mumbled beneath his breath as he watched me out of the side of his eye. He was just a baby, maybe seventeen, if that old.

“Have some fucking respect, man!” Orange Cap yelled and slapped Brown Leather Jacket in the face with the roll of money. “Move the fuck outta the way,” he said and shoved him backward.

“Here you go, miss,” Orange Cap said and stepped aside, holding the door open for me. I heard the vials of crack clinking in his pockets as he moved.

“Thanks,” I responded, still keeping my eyes away from the money and trying hard not to look at either of their faces. I stepped inside the small gray box and said a prayer.

Orange Cap didn’t let the door close right away; he just stood there smiling at me, blinding me with the row of gold fangs that covered his top front teeth. I was looking at the buttons, trying to will my finger to stop pressing number 3 over and over again.
Idiot,
I called myself in my mind.

My heart was racing and I was sure he could smell my fear. Finally I looked up and into Orange Cap’s face. He was cute, long lashes and nice thick lips. It made it easier for me. I smiled and said, “It don’t work if you keep the door open,” with just a sprinkle of street.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said and laughed before letting the door close. The elevator jerked upward and I leaned into the graffiti-scarred walls and thanked God for getting me through … again.

The elevator came to a stop and I stepped into the corridor. My heart was beating so loudly I couldn’t hear the sound of my footsteps as I hurried down the hallway toward my apartment. I moved quickly, careful not to kick over the empty beer bottles and crack vials that littered the black and white checked floor.

The lightbulbs had been shattered again; the soft white glass crunched lightly beneath my feet. I thanked God for the moonlight as I moved on.

I smelled pork chops and I could hear the crackle and pop of the grease as it raged against the flame. When I pushed the door open I was greeted by the blaring noise of the television; Delia kept it loud to drown out the sound of gunshots that rang in from the courtyard every night.

She was seated on the secondhand tweed couch, bent over as far as her round belly would allow as she tried desperately to paint her toenails.

“Hello,” I said and let the tension of the hall slip from my shoulders.

Delia looked up, grunted a greeting at me, and went back to her toenails.

She was barely fifty-five, but the weight she’d gained over the past few years made her look ten years older. Her hair was a mass of gray and had only recently started to grow back in around the edges. “Nerves,” the doctor had told her when it started dropping out in clumps. Delia’s eyes were vacant and they made you feel sad just to look into them. Her skin was blotchy and dark in places where Hy-Lo’s fists had visited often enough to leave behind marks that she would die with.

The heat of the apartment gathered me into its clutches, forcing beads of sweat to form on my forehead and above my lip. “It’s hot in here,” I exclaimed as I began to remove my coat.

“Uh-huh,” Delia said absently and attacked her pinky toe with the tiny brush.

The couch tilted a bit with her weight. It had probably seen twenty different apartments by the time it got to ours. The left back leg was missing and so we substituted it with two encyclopedias. The cushions were thin and growing thinner by the day. That was how Salvation Army furniture was. Overused, broken down, and shabby, just like the people who purchased it.

Shabby.
That was the word that always came to mind when I walked into the apartment, greeted by the dull beige walls and peeling paint that hung from the ceiling like cobwebs. I had to bite my lip just to keep the word from spilling out of my mouth in a loud angry scream.

Shabby.
That’s what would be on my tongue when I slipped the key in the lock and jiggled until the bolt slipped free.
Shabby
is what I saw when I saw my mother, her hair gray from worry and arms fat from Fritos and Pepsi-Cola.
Shabby
is what rested on the tip of my tongue, but “hello” is what I would say when I stepped in.

I sighed and came to sit beside Delia on the couch.

“I was thinking maybe next summer we could go down to Florida, maybe, um, visit with my cousin Anna and her family,” Delia said, leaning back to admire her toenails.

“Uh-huh,” I responded, not sure where she was going with this. We had not seen or spoken to Anna in about five years.

Delia lit a cigarette and took a puff between every three or four words. I looked on and listened intently. She did this when she was trying to avoid what she really wanted to say.

“Or maybe we could go on down to Sandersville and see Tessie and her husband Michael. They’re always asking us to come down. Maybe next summer …” She trailed off as she lit another cigarette.

“Uh-huh,” I responded again and went to the kitchen to turn the chops.

“Yeah, that’ll be real nice. A vacation next summer,” Delia said and reached for the nail polish again.

Do you think he’ll be dead by then?

I heard the voice inside me pipe up and I turned to see if Delia had heard it too. She hadn’t, she was focused on the second coat of red polish she was struggling to apply.

Well, do you think he’ll be dead?
the voice inside me was asking, pushing, demanding.

Where will we get the money for a vacation? I thought to myself, trying to ignore the voice in my head.

Well?

Public Assistance didn’t give out enough money for plane trips and a new pair of open-toed sandals. Where would the money come from? I asked myself again, louder, way above the sound of the voice in my head.

Will he be dead?

The voice won out, its questions filling not just my mind, but every space in my body. “I don’t know!” I said aloud.

“What?” Delia yelled from the living room. “What did you say, Kenzie?”

“Nothing, Mom,” I said and bit my tongue. I felt the blood fill my mouth and I thought: Good, that’s what you get!

The voice went silent.

We sat together on the couch and watched sitcom after sitcom until finally ten o’clock rolled around and the news came on.

“Oh, please,” Delia huffed at the newscaster. She rolled her eyes and reached for the remote.

“It’s ten o’clock, Mom, it’s all that’s going to be on now,” I said and curled my arms around myself. “What’s wrong with the news?” I asked, already knowing she would ignore the question.

Delia used to like the news. “You need a world view of things,” that’s what she used to say. The world view was the real view to Delia. But now things were different and she did not want to deal with any reality except her own, and her reality was right here on the couch in this shabby apartment, no more and no less.

She preferred to lose herself in the afternoon soap operas, evening sitcoms, and late-night talk shows. We spoke to each other during commercials. Three minutes of empty chatter that touched on nothing important and never, ever stumbled onto talk of Hy-Lo. He did not exist to her. He’d been dead to her long before he lay dying in a hospital bed across town.

“Summer in Florida, yeah, that would be real nice,” Delia said again and flipped the channel away from the news.

Up until I was twelve, my summers were spent lazing beneath billowing white clouds that moved slowly over my grandmother’s house. This was Foch Boulevard, South Ozone Park, Queens, where laughter was a daily tonic and hugs and kisses were always in great abundance.

Back then, that part of Queens was still rural. Only the main streets were black-topped. Foch Boulevard was a long, narrow dirt road where raccoons roamed in search of food during the early-morning hours. It was the North imitating the South, a slice of Augusta and a wisp of Richmond right in the middle of Queens.

Large oak trees shaded Foch Boulevard; they towered above the neat one-family homes that lined the block. In the summer their branches hung heavy with glossy green leaves the size of two hands. We children would stand on our toes and pluck them free, lacing them together with needle and thread and draping them along the backyard fences as decorations for our imaginary dinner parties.

Butterflies filled our days with all the colors of the rainbow while the night glowed alive with lightning bugs. We painted our lips with the juice from wild blackberries and gorged ourselves sick with the fat green grapes that hung heavy from the vines that wrapped and weaved their way along the brick walls of the backyards.

People left their front doors unlocked and sat out on their small porches late into the summer night telling downhome stories, not caring if the next workday was just a few hours away. Summertime on Foch Boulevard came but once a year and you only got one round at life—you had to make the best of both.

It was there among the salmon- and slate-colored stones that paved the patio and bordered the small green patch of grass that was my grandmother’s yard, that I was able to be a child. For two straight months, my smile found my lips again and plastered itself happily across my face. My cuticles grew in thick and my stomach filled out round inside me.

For two months I was able to watch television until my eyes burned for sleep. For two months Malcolm and I stuffed as many Oreo cookies as we could into our mouths and then washed them down with cherry Kool-Aid. Two months of White Castle hamburgers, drive-in movies, and dancing in our underwear beneath the rushing cold water of the fire hydrant.