Another Brooklyn (9 page)

You said she was coming tomorrow and—
my brother said.

For a long time, I believed it was true.

When did you first realize your mother had actually died?
Sister Sonja wanted to know.

Outside, I could see the trees lining Fort Greene Park. It was clear out, warm, the beginning of spring. There was the rope of ivy on her windowsill, the leaves moving neatly along the ledge and down. There were gates on the windows, even though her office was only on the seventh floor. Had anyone ever vaulted past her? Jumped?

I looked up at her.

Why do you think my mother has died?

Three months passed before I saw Sylvia again. She was wearing her school uniform, her belly pushing against the buttons. She waved to me from across the street, two-way traffic between us.

August!

But I was leaving Brooklyn. I was already halfway gone.

It became the year of slipping into the pages of my textbooks and disappearing. It became the year of AP classes and PSAT review, of stretching toward something new, unfamiliar, a thing called the Ivy League. Because Bushwick had once been a forest and we had been called ghetto girls even though
we were beautiful and our arms were locked together and our T-shirts blared our names and zodiac signs.

I pulled down the urn that had sat on the high bookshelf for as long as I could remember, lifted the top, and looked inside.

My mother walked into the water.

I moved the urn into the room I still shared with my brother, setting it on the nightstand beside my bed. All night long, I kept one hand pressed against it.

This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.

The night before Gigi landed the role of Mary Magdalene in the drama club's production of
Jesus Christ Superstar,
she called me, made me promise I'd be in the front row, beside Sylvia.
Let it go,
Gigi said.
The baby's already been made and you didn't want that boy anyway.
She said she'd put a coat on a seat in case Angela came back.

Can we do like olden times?
Gigi said.
For me?

But that night, as I pulled my coat on, I stopped, remembering Sylvia's belly and the urn filled with ashes and the boy who once winked up at me. I sat on the edge of my bed remembering running over the SweetGrove land and the sound of Clyde's laughter and my mother with a knife under her pillow and Sister Loretta's hands going in circles as she scrubbed the kitchen floor.

I sat there, the apartment silent, growing hot inside my coat. I sat there long after the play had ended.

Gigi faltered. During the last verse of “I Don't Know How to Love Him,” a crack in her voice echoed through the auditorium.
Everyone laughed,
I'd heard later.
The whole auditorium. Everyone.
We didn't mean to. We didn't know . . .

Sylvia hadn't shown. Gigi's mother hadn't shown. The coats over the seats Gigi had saved for us remained there until her castmates took theirs and only hers remained.

Two steps to the left or right or back or front and you're standing outside your life.

Someone's friend knew someone who lived at the Chelsea Hotel. The cast party was on the eleventh floor.

Who was there to see Gigi lift her heels up and fly?

That year, her hair had grown long past her back. Most days she pulled it up into a braid. But on the
evening of the performance, she'd worn it out, letting it fan over her shoulders. Did it lift like a dark wing into the Chelsea night? Did she really believe there was nothing on the other side of fifteen?

If the tribes of the Fijis send their living off to join their dead, it should have been me flying. Or Angela. But we remained on earth. Believing ourselves wingless.

When I stepped off the bus in Providence, Rhode Island, I was alone. I had wanted this—to step outside of Brooklyn on my own, no past, just the now and the future.

Auggie,
I corrected the professor on my first day.
My name is Auggie. I'm here because even when I was a kid, I wanted a deeper understanding of death and dying.

That's crazy,
the white devil of a boy who would become my first lover turned to me and said, his
skin so pale I could see the blue veins running through it.
Me, too.

How do you begin to tell your own story? The first time I heard the Art Ensemble of Chicago, I called out Gigi's name. How could any of us have known? Roscoe Mitchell on saxophone, Lester Bowie on trumpet, the stumbling together of horns and drums and bells into music until so much beauty rose into the world breathing had to be remembered again, forced. How had Sylvia's philosophy-spouting father missed this? How had my own father, so deep inside his grief, not known there were men who had lived this, who knew how to tell his story? How had the four of us, singing along to Rod Stewart and Tavares and the Hues Corporation, not turned our radio just that much to the right or left and found Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis?

And when we pressed our heads to each other's hearts how did we not hear Carmen McRae sing
ing? In Angela's fisted hands, Billie Holiday staggered past us and we didn't know her name. Nina Simone told us how beautiful we were and we didn't hear her voice.

I spent my twenties sleeping with white boys in photo-less rooms filled with jazz. As I pushed their resistant heads down, I thought of Brooklyn, of Jerome and Sylvia and Angela and Gigi. I cried out to the sounds of brown boys cursing and Bowie's trumpet wailing. When I pulled my lovers into me, my eyes closed tight against the faces I had grown up believing belonged to the devil, I imagined myself home again, my girls around me, the four of us laughing. All of us alive.

In the Philippines, a beautiful brown man pressed his lips to my feet again and again, saying,
Always begin here
. In Wisconsin, I promised my housemate turned lover that I'd stay with her always. Months later, as the scattered pages of
my dissertation lay finished and approved on the floor beneath us, I kissed her slightly parted lips as she slept and left in the night. In Bali, I waited at night for a beautiful black man from Detroit to show up in the dark.
Say it,
he begged, our bodies moving against each other with such a hunger, we laughed out loud.
It's just three damn words.

I turned thirty in Korea, cried for a week because I thought I was pregnant. Then cried for another when it was certain I was not. In the background, Abbey Lincoln sang “It's Magic” and I saw again the view of our block from a high-up window, the children playing below my brother and me.

Once in a café in San Francisco the woman I had lived with for eight months asked why did I sleep with fisted hands.

Do I?

Yeah, you do,
she said.

Once I came very close to saying
For a long time, my mother wasn't dead yet
. But didn't.

In the autumn of my sixteenth year, my father took us back to SweetGrove. We rode the train to Tennessee then rented a car and drove an hour to where our land had once been. The leaves were beginning to turn, but the air was still thick with heat. We arrived in the early evening. My brother and I slammed out of the car like we were children again, running down the long dirt road that lead to the house. But where our house had once been, there were weeds now, taller than any of us and thick as poles. From where we had stopped, I could smell the briny water. We stood there, silent. In the silence, we could hear the soft lap of the lake.
I took my brother's hand and together, silently, we walked toward it. Orange signs were nailed to the trees around us.
NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE LAND. DO NOT CROSS
. But we kept on walking. The water was dark, near black against the brightly colored trees.

When did you realize your mother was actually dead,
Sister Sonja would ask again months later.

Never. Every day. Yesterday. Right at this moment.

When my father took us back to the water.

I could hear our father approaching. Even here, so far away from Brooklyn, his soft, slow steps were as familiar as time.

Way out, I could see a person in a canoe, gently paddling along the line of pine trees. At its deepest point, the water dropped down to twenty feet.
I've only ever put my toes in,
my mother would say.
I just needed to feel it against my feet, that's all. And be close by.

At the diner, after my father's funeral, my brother suddenly asked,
Why did you always say that? Why did you always tell me she was coming tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?

For a long time, I said nothing, then finally,
Because I believed it was true. That one of these tomorrows, she'd get here.

Someplace off the coast of South Carolina, a tribe of Ibo people brought over by slave catchers tossed themselves into the water. They believed that since the water had brought them here, the water would take them home. They believed going home to the water was far better than living their lives enslaved.

When I see Angela again, I am in my first year at Brown, sitting in my room on a Friday night. A boy I am planning to sleep with has his head on my lap. She appears suddenly on the television screen, darker than I remember her, her hair long and straightened. But her face is the same, angled and beautiful. The movie is about a dancer hungry for the lead role in
La Sylphide,
as her fiancé runs off and her own real life mirrors the story. Angela is stunning as she dances across the stage, her body thinner than I remember, but muscled and able. When she dances toward the camera, I call out to her.

Angela!

The boy asks if I know her.

She's hot,
he says.

Angela,
I whisper.
You made it.

Behind my brother and me, my father was saying that it was time to move on now, but none of us moved from where we were standing.

Wind came up, shuddering the leaves. The person in the canoe had stopped paddling and now cast a line into the water. Perch. Trout. Maybe catfish but I'm not sure.

This is memory.

I watched the water slowly lap back and forth against the shore. The sun was beginning to set. I took my brother's hand and held it. We had no people left in Tennessee. We'd stay the night in a hotel, buy some souvenirs somewhere. In the late afternoon tomorrow, we'd get back into our rented car and begin the long journey home to Brooklyn.

I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.