Another Brooklyn (7 page)

But Gigi was the first to fly. A woman in white patent leather go-go boots came and got her from school one day so she could audition for a performing arts school in Manhattan.

Everybody,
Gigi said.
Meet my mom.

Hey,
we said, struck silent by a woman so young and beautiful she could have been on the cover of
Ebony
or a centerfold in
Jet
magazine.

Hey yourselves,
Gigi's mother said.

At the audition, Gigi told us she had to say the same lines over and over—
Hey Big Daddy, ain't you heard . . . the boogie-woogie rumble of a Dream Deferred?

Gigi said her lines again and again for us, her voice deeper, strange, our Gigi but different, standing in front of us inside someone else's skin.

They said I
had something. A white lady there said
,
You could be someone
.

Then, suddenly, as though Sylvia's father looked closely at us and saw every single thing he hated, we were no longer Sylvia's friends but ghetto girls. When we arrived late in the afternoon, he stood at the door.
No company today,
he said to us.
Sylvia needs to get ready for her new school.

Go home,
he said.
Study. Become somebody better than you are.

We could have blamed his stinging words on his stilted English. We could have said
Fuck you, man—
become who he thought we already were. But we were silent.

None of us asked, what new school. Or why. He was tall and thick, his hatred for us a deep wrinkle between his eyebrows.

We turned away from Sylvia's door, said good-bye to each other at the corner, each of us sinking into an embarrassed silence, ashamed of our skin, our hair, the way we said our own names. We saw what he saw when we looked at each other. So we looked away and headed home.

In class, Sylvia's empty seat reminded us of her father, his arms folded across his chest, his glare a reminder of a power that was becoming more and
more familiar to us. A power we neither had nor understood.

When we saw Sylvia again a week later, she was wearing a St. Thomas Aquinas uniform, her older sister's arm tight around her shoulder. She glanced at us, mouthed,
Park later.
I squeezed Gigi's hand and nodded.

That evening, Sylvia pulled a joint from her coat pocket, let it slowly disappear into her mouth then pulled it out again,
To seal it,
she said. None of us asked where she'd gotten the joint or the Winston matchbook. We circled around her and watched her take the smoke deep into her lungs, hold it, then exhale. We followed her lead, the smoke hot and hard against the back of my throat. We had seen teenagers doing this, crowded together tight as fists, their eyes closed against the smoke. We coughed our way through, laughing at our own ignorance until the laughter and the smoke seemed to release everything impossible in the world.

It was winter again and Angela had lost herself in dance, Gigi in lead role after lead role at the performing arts high school she now attended.

I spent my days watching people move, both outside our building and inside, too. Jennie was replaced by Carla, who stayed only a month before the police came and took her away. Carla was replaced by Trinity, a small, girlish man who spoke French to the men who followed behind him up the stairs in the evening.

At mosque the sisters asked,
What about their mother
?
their eyes taking in my father's thin mustache, his thick close-cut head of hair, his broad shoulders. The manicured nails on his eight remaining fingers promised them damage, imperfection, and, they hoped, need.

Their mother is gone,
my father answered.

Their mother's gone,
Sister Loretta echoed.

What's in the urn, Daddy?

You know what's in that damn urn, August!

At night, I spoke to my mother, apologized for the lies my father told, promised her there'd come a day when he'd be less afraid. He'd take us back to Tennessee then, back to SweetGrove. I told her to be patient, that with Allah, all things were possible.

We turned thirteen and it seemed wherever we were, there were hands and tongues. There were sloe-eyes and licked lips wherever our new breasts and lengthening thighs moved.

Angela and Gigi and I showed up at Sylvia's house one Saturday morning when the family was gone. Sylvia, able to sneak us inside, stood ironing her Catholic school uniform as we talked.
It happened
,
Angela said.
I'm bleeding.

Finally,
we said.

We thought you'd never join us on this side,
we said.

We were teenagers now, our bodies different but all of us still the same height, all of us still blending into each other.

We found places to be together, sharing a joint on the stairs of the closed library, stepping over prayer rugs to sit on my bed, cutting two pizza slices into four at Royal Pizzeria because if we bought something, we could sit for hours. Park swings, handball courts, the spot of sun on the corner where a windowless factory set dozens of pale, tired women free every day at 5:00
P.M.

Angela said,
My mother said don't tell a soul.

But we didn't have to open our mouths. Summer came again and men and boys were everywhere, feathery hands on our backsides in crowds, eyes falling too long at our chests, whispers into our
ears as we passed strangers. Promises—of things they could do to us, with us, for us.

When Sylvia threatened to run away, her father said we could stay over. He asked to call our parents, make sure they knew where we were. We no longer looked at him—gave him our numbers without lifting our eyes. Angela said,
My mother already knows,
quickly before anyone could dial a number, speak to someone.
It's fine,
Angela said, looking anywhere else.

After speaking to my father, he said,
He's a good man. He has his God. A man needs his God.
He eyed Angela, the torn sweater, the hole in the toe of her dingy socks. Angela tucked one foot behind the other, bent into herself. Then, saying nothing, he left.

We stayed up late, watching television sitcoms, eating Popsicles and bags of candy. Sylvia and I wore
baby-doll pajamas that felt obscene and made us giddy. We slow-danced with each other. Angela showed us how to French-kiss and we spent hours practicing. We practiced until our bodies felt as though they were exploding.

We whispered,
I love you
and meant it.

We said,
This is scary
and laughed.

When Jerome asked where I'd learned what I learned I said,
Don't worry about it
because he was eighteen and I was nearly fourteen and nothing mattered but hearing
I love you
and believing he meant it.

There were days when we sat in front of the television watching Clark Kent fall in love with Lois Lane and understood what it meant to hold secrets close. When Angela cried but wouldn't tell us why, we promised her our loyalty, reminded her
that she was beautiful, said
Knock, Knock, Angela. Let us in, let us in.
We stroked the sharp knots of her cheekbones, moved our fingers gently over her lips, lifted her shirt, and kissed her breasts. We said,
You're so beautiful.
We said,
Don't be afraid.
We said,
Don't cry.

When she danced, her dance told stories none of us were old enough to hear, the deep arch of her back, the long neck impossibly turned, the hands begging air into her chest.

What are you saying,
we begged.
Tell us what it is you need.

But Angela was silent.

On the Fourth of July, my father took all of us to the East River, where thousands of people crowded to watch fireworks explode above the water. Pressed against each other, Angela whispered into my ear,
I'm gonna leave this place one day.

I promised her we'd go with her.

But Angela shook her head, her straightened hair hot curled into a mushroom low over her brow and ears. She stared straight ahead at the fireworks.

Nah,
she said.
Ya'll won't.

That night, as New York and the rest of the country celebrated its independence, everywhere we looked, the world was red, white, and blue. We had shared a joint in the smoky bathroom of a crowded McDonald's and felt wild and giddy and free. On the subway home, someone's boom box played “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” and we all laughed, singing along.

Hop on the bus, Gus. You don't need to discuss much.

Angela nodding, saying,
You know that's right!

On a different planet, we could have been Lois Lane or Tarzan's Jane or Mary Tyler Moore or Marlo Thomas. We could have thrown our hats up, twirled and smiled. We could have made it after all. We watched the shows. We knew the songs. We sang along when Mary was big-eyed and awed by Minneapolis. We dreamed with Marlo of someday hitting the big time. We took off with the Flying Nun.

But we were young. And we were on earth, heading home to Brooklyn.

I looked for Jennie's children in the faces of strangers. The terrified girl with her hand closed tight around pieces of bologna, the boy with his too-small shoes. The night the woman came to take them, they had cried late into the day. My brother and I went down to get them, but the door was locked.
Open the door,
we said again and again. But even though we could hear them crying, they wouldn't open it. So we went back upstairs and turned the radio on.

They were on this side of the Biafran war, filling their mouths with whatever we offered, their
stomachs never seeming full. Same dark skin. Same fearful eyes. Where had they been taken to this time?

Open the door,
we said.
It's us. We have food upstairs. We can play hide-and-seek. Please open the door,
we said.
We can take you someplace better.

We were not poor but we lived on the edge of poverty.

Alana moved in across the street. She wore men's suits and did the hustle with her green-eyed girlfriend inside the front gate, her perfect dome of an Afro bouncing. When she smiled, one side of her mouth went up followed by the other, and the four of us sat on the curb watching her, fascinated.

At night, when the DJs plugged extension cords into the streetlights, the four of us followed the line
of brown and white cords to the music in the park. We watched neighborhood boys break-dance on flattened cardboard boxes and we screamed when the DJ threw Stevie Wonder's “Sir Duke” onto the turntable, and Jerome pulled me away from my girls. In the darkness, with Stevie singing,
They can feel it all over . . .
I let Jerome kneel down in front of me, pull my shorts to my knees, and put his mouth on me until my body, from neck to knees, exploded. I pressed my back into the cement wall of the handball court, trembling. The DJ had cut a slow song I didn't know into Sir Duke and I felt tearful suddenly. This was the temple I had promised Sister Loretta I'd protect, and now, cold suddenly, my shorts still down below my knees, I held Jerome's head a moment, his face soft and wet against my belly, then pushed him down again.

Temperatures broke the hundred-degree mark and we sweated through the days to get to nights
in the park. Angela found a boy named John who had delicate fingers and spoke with a lisp. Sylvia's boyfriend was Jerome's age, pulling Sylvia away from us into the darkness behind the handball courts. Gigi said she was falling in love with Oswaldo, whose older brother had been killed in a gang fight with the Devil's Rebel's the summer before. We were afraid of the gangs and the fires that turned the wood-framed houses in our neighborhood to ash. But we had our guys and we had each other.

We knew the stories. Down on Knickerbocker a girl ran out of her house, her robe on fire. By the time she was safe, she was naked. On Halsey Street, a fireman carried two small children down the fire escape. For a long time, he couldn't pry their frightened arms from around his neck. I searched for the children's names in the paper, wondering if they had been Jennie's children.

At the end of the night, we pressed against our boyfriends, fingers locked together, slow swaying
as the DJ announced,
We about to shut this party down, y'all
. Still, we held on to them, their skinny bodies as uncertain as our own of what we were moving toward.
Please,
they begged. And for a long time, we whispered back,
Not that. Not yet.

Charlsetta had been sent away. She was sixteen, captain of the Thomas Jefferson cheerleaders. She had a straightened ponytail and bangs oiled and spiraling over her forehead. For weeks, we asked her younger brother where she'd gone. The whole block had heard the yelling. We had watched her mother leaving the house for work in the morning, stern-faced and stiff-backed.
Charlsetta got her behind beat last night,
we said to each other.
Her mother tore her up
.

And we laughed until the beating became legendary, a warning to all of us that this kind of public humiliation was only one belt-whipping away. There was some Charlsetta buried in each of us.

She got a baby inside her,
her brother finally admitted.
She got sent back Down South.

We pulled our boyfriends' fingers from inside of us, pushed them away, buttoned our blouses. We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. The threat of a place we could end back up in to be raised by a crusted-over single auntie or strict grandmother.

Down South was full of teenagers like Charlsetta, their bellies out in front of them, cartwheeling in barren front yards as chickens pecked around them. We shivered thinking of Charlsetta's belly and imagined her and her boyfriend together while her mother was at work. How many times had they done it? How did it feel? When did she know?

We sat on stoops looking toward Charlsetta's house. We thought she'd come home with a pink-blanketed baby in her arms. We imagined
her taking up her spot again on the squad, her blue and gold pom-poms in the air—
Come on team, fight-fight with all your might-might, get on the floor and let's score some more. Go boy!—
her ponytail bouncing, her bangs low over her eyes. When time passed and she didn't come home, we imagined she'd come home baby-less, the crusty auntie or pinch-faced grandmother raising the child as her own, sending Charlsetta back to her life in Brooklyn.

Autumn came and the DJs stopped setting up their amps and speakers in the park. The streetlights stopped flickering from the ebb and flow of stolen electricity. Our boyfriends begged, and again and again we said,
No
.

Charlsetta's brother broke both his arms at Bushwick Park, the cast slings crisscrossing over his chest.
Is your sister back yet,
we asked him. Always, the answer was no.
Damn!
we said.
She's been gone forever.

Was my father as absent as I remember? A folding chair in the kitchen and him in it, his head bent toward his hands, fingers moving over the bump where a thumb had once been, his black suit pants sharply creased by a too-hot iron so that there was a shine to parts of the fabric—a near-burntness that would remain, forever. Where had the fingers gone, my brother and I asked each other well into our teens.
A dog ate them,
we said.
His hands got stuck in a hole and he pulled and pulled until. Until.

Winter came, and by late December Brooklyn was ankle deep in ice and snow. Platform shoes dominated New York, so we stumbled through the neighborhood in knee-high platform boots that zipped up the side but were anything but waterproof. I shivered through the winter, unsteady and half-frozen while my father stared down at his hands. He was living inside his faith by then, which left little room for understanding teenage girls. Where my brother and I had once
been locked behind a half-open window, we were now more free than either of us could understand. Some evenings coming home I looked up to see my brother at the window, staring over the block, blank-eyed.

A week after Christmas, a woman was found coatless and dead on the roof of the Marcy Houses projects. Women had been found dead before—in hallways, in basements, in the unlit corners of subway platforms. Sometimes, as we walked the streets, we imagined our own selves found somewhere. How long would it take to know? Who would be the first to ask,
Have you seen August? Have you seen . . . Angela . . . ?

Angela said,
I don't know where my mother is.
Her voice was thick, a tremble to the words. I grabbed her hard, pulled her to me.
Angela,
I said,
she's fine.
She's fine!

Sylvia and Gigi stood back, away from us so that it felt like the world was spinning around an eye of sorrow only Angela and I were inside of.

It's not her, Ang. I swear.

But it
was
her. A Medicaid card and a five-dollar food stamp in her left coat pocket. A photo of Angela, front teeth missing, in her right.
Angela “Angel” Thompson, Age 7
,
carefully written in ballpoint pen. Someone at Kings County probably said
Lord, I know that woman's child.

Before we knew it was her mother, Angela spent three nights at my house, the two of us curled together on the pullout sofa, my father in my bed. Her hair smelled of sweat and Royal Crown hair grease, her breath coming fast, even when she was sound asleep. In the only light coming in from a streetlamp, I stared at her and saw deep beneath
the smooth cheeks and broad nose, there she was—there was the woman staggering past us with her thin face, nearly toothless mouth, and Angela's eyes.

In the near darkness, I saw the roof, Angela's mother curled fetal against the cold. I saw the water. I saw Angela crumbling to the snow-covered ground. I saw my father kissing my mother good-bye, the satin lining her bed, the Bible against her chest, the thin gold band on her too-still finger. I opened my mouth to speak. Then closed it again. And stayed that way for a long, long time.

On the third morning, my father took the day off from work and took Angela to the police station.
This child's mama
,
he said,
seems to be missing.