Strangers at the Feast (6 page)

She grabbed Priya’s hand. “You must be ravenous.”

The refrigerator light caught Priya like a paparazzi flashbulb. Slowly, she stuck her hand inside to feel the cool bare shelves. She touched a jar of chutney, and extracted the lone withered carrot Ginny had forgotten to throw out.

“Let’s just order Chinese.”

After dinner, Ginny bathed her, working the wet washcloth over her spine, the sharp ridges ancient and fishlike. Ginny soaped her shoulders and elbows, her stomach. She gently lathered shampoo in her hair and felt small scabs on her scalp. She slowly combed out all the knots and tangles, wrapped Priya in a thick purple towel.

Ginny pulled out the hair dryer and blew it on her own hair. “See? To dry your hair so you don’t catch a cold.”

But Priya winced at the hot air.

“God, sorry. We’ll let it dry the old-fashioned way.”

When Priya finally fell asleep, Ginny phoned her mother. She hadn’t told anyone yet about the adoption—or rather, the pending adoption—and as she watched Priya curl up in the stiff white I ♥ NY T-shirt she’d bought at JFK, her chest rising and falling peacefully, she seemed like the most exquisite decision Ginny had ever made.

“Mom?” she whispered. “Did I wake you?”

“Oh, Ginny, I’m glad you called. I was looking at my organizer and I wanted to make sure you sent a present to the twins. It was a shame you weren’t at the birthday party. Everybody asked, ‘Where’s Ginny?’ They really couldn’t believe you’d want to go to India of all places, and for so long, and then nobody heard from you! Marty Cooper said something about a coworker getting typhoid there. Anyway, a present is important. But not something from India. Not a souvenir, a genuine present.”

Ginny walked the cordless over to Priya, to remind herself that she was real: she touched her toes, watching her leg bend reflexively.

“Sure, I’ll get them a present.”

“Why are you whispering? Ginny, I can hardly hear you. Oh, wait, and this must mean you are back from India! Oh, thank goodness. Is your apartment okay? No trouble with that house sitter, I hope. We just had an awful row with our lawn people, and your father says he’s going to mow the lawn himself. Arthritis be damned.”

“Everything is fine. I’m tired, though.”

“You will remember the present?”

“Good night, Mom.”

Ginny climbed into bed with Priya and draped her arm over her. Her bee-stung lips parted and Ginny could smell toothpaste on her warm breath. Traces of strawberry shampoo rose from her scalp. Her long eyelashes fluttered.

Ginny nestled her head against Priya’s chest and listened to the thud of her heart.

My daughter.

KIJO

They were running late, and Kijo was pissed. He’d been standing on the deserted corner of Merrell and Edison almost an hour, his hands cold as ice, when Spider finally pulled up in the Diamond Diagnostics van. Kijo jiggled the familiar rusty door handle and threw his duffel in the back, then squeezed himself into the passenger seat.

“You suddenly forget where the projects are?”

“You gonna sulk all day?”

Kijo had been planning this for weeks. All Spider had to do was show up on time. Kijo had the map, the supplies. Today was their one chance.

“I told you this is big,” he said.

“I’m a force of nature, Kij, to be sure. But traffic’s traffic.”

In the quiet of the blue van they looked each other over. They hadn’t discussed what to wear, but Kijo now realized they had both put on special clothing. Spider, who once wore a red leather coat he’d bought at Goodwill for a whole week until he discovered it was for women, was draped in a gray hooded track sweatshirt. Kijo had on a dark turtleneck and black corduroys. Nothing distinctive. Nothing memorable.

Spider gripped the steering wheel with his black leather gloves and hit the gas. In the side mirror Kijo watched the low brick buildings of Vidal Court fade into the distance. Kijo had imagined his departure differently. That morning, he’d felt the urge to tell everyone “I’m a man of action. Nobody messes with me.” He wanted people to gather
and watch him drive away like townspeople in Westerns did as the cowboy kicked his horse and galloped off. But the stoops had been empty, the parking lot quiet, and his brief vision of heroism was lost in the solitude of the gray morning; as usual, no one much cared what he was doing.

Kijo dangled his arm out the window, the November air bathing his face. The windows were rolled down to clear out the stench of all the blood and piss Uncle Clarence had spent twenty years hauling up the interstate. Spider’s uncle Clarence had delivered specimens for Diamond Diagnostics, supplying replacement specimens for a certain price. More times than Kijo cared to remember, hopping a ride to the movies he and Spider heard Uncle Clarence unzip himself in the back, piss rattling into a plastic cup.

But Clarence had died a month earlier and the van now belonged to Spider. From the rearview mirror hung a mop of dirty shoelaces from track races Spider had won. A half-eaten pizza—Spider’s “breakfast of champions”—sat on the dashboard. It was an old van, the kind with seats that didn’t budge, and Kijo’s knees pressed against the glove compartment. He’d never been jealous of Spider, but he now wished he had a van of his own. He’d recently come to understand that for a man to have any peace, he had to command a space: boat captains, pilots, bartenders, gas station owners, fathers—they said how things were done on their turf. Kijo had just turned seventeen.

His birthday had gotten him thinking on the future. Kijo thought it would make sense to someday open a grocery. Put his favorite video games in the back—Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, the old-school ones, because he believed history gave a place class. He’d set the hours, the rules: no barefeet, no radios, don’t even think about coming in here without your shirt, no telling the same dumb-ass long-winded story twice! He’d give kids free Atomic FireBalls so they wouldn’t come back waving a gun. He’d call it Kijo’s. But to the people working there, he’d be Mr. Jackson.

Kijo wasn’t superstitious, especially not about wishes, since he’d
swiped so many coins from wishing ponds over the years. But when he’d blown out the candles on the cake Grandma Rose had made and wished for his grocery store, he had a bad feeling in his gut. Like he should have wished for something noble, like Grandma Rose’s health, or a safe place for them to live. When he came home from his job at the mall a few nights later and saw her bruised lip, he blamed himself.

Kijo glanced at his watch, tapped the side of the van nervously.

Spider said, “Chill, man, we gonna do this. Your ace is on the case.”

They’d been friends since they were five. When Spider’s father went to the fed pen. They didn’t talk about Spider’s father leaving, just as now they didn’t talk about Uncle Clarence dying from cancer, or about Grandma Rose getting beaten up. They talked about what was ahead of them. Kijo didn’t talk much anyway. For most of his childhood he’d suffered a stutter; when he wanted to speak, his tongue got sticky and his lips tightened. He envied the way words gushed from Puerto Rican kids, like water from hydrants in July. He watched horse races on television because he liked the keyed-up voices of the announcers. But words snagged in Kijo’s mouth like a sweater on a nail; they came out long and crooked.

Grandma Rose wrote words on thick rubber bands and stretched them in front of him, reminding him to slow down:
BECAUSE, MONDAY, FORGIVE
.
B
’s and
m
’s and
f
’s were the toughest. Before supper, she always made him say “The big fat cat sat on the rat.” At night, Kijo lay in bed in the dark, reciting:

Fresh fried fish,

Fish fresh fried,

Fried fish fresh,

Fish fried fresh.

He practiced so much that sometimes, without realizing it, he’d walk down the street doing his exercises. Kids would shout, “Hey, big
black bastard babbling!” “Whassup, noisy nigger nagging nonsense?” “Good morning, kuh kuh kuh kuh Kijo.”

The older boys once told him that if he stuck his tongue to a frozen fence post he’d be cured. Kijo could still recall the taste of blood and metal as he tried to peel his tongue loose, how little Spider Walcott had waited until the boys were gone and poured orange soda over Kijo’s mouth until his tongue melted free.

Even at age five, Spider, fast and fidgety, had a mysterious patience for Kijo’s stutter. He’d sit with his hands on his knees and watch Kijo’s slow lips, examining the jagged syllables Kijo spat out like a child digging for spearheads.

“This is like some nature reserve,” said Spider as they drove north of downtown.

Kijo had never seen this part of Stamford but knew folks called it the primeval forest. The roads were kinked; thick trees blocked the sun. Waist-high stone walls lined the road. There were no sidewalks.

Kijo studied the map in his lap. “Take the next right,” he said slowly. His stutter was long gone, but years of training had made him careful to pronounce each syllable. His voice was deep, so deep it surprised people. Grandma Rose said he sounded like Paul Robeson, or James Earl Jones. After a few beers, Spider always begged him to do Darth Vader. Kijo would then breath slow through his nose and say, “I am your father, Luke.”

In the van’s side mirror Kijo studied his face: his lips had thickened, his nose was two thumbs wide, like the Jamaicans’, except he wasn’t Jamaican, as far as he knew. He didn’t know if he was handsome; he was too shy to try his way with girls. Even the girl who worked the Pretzel King counter at the mall, who slipped mustard packets into her purse each night and smiled at him as he lobbed trash bags into his metal cart.

“Nice aim, bag boy,” she’d say.

He liked the girl, but didn’t like that she called him “boy.” Kijo had a boy’s face on a man’s body. His shoulders were broad and he was
tall, taller than any kid he knew. In the past year he’d felt manhood dawn on him: things were opening, pushing, weighing inside him. He understood it was his job to take care of problems.

“Vidal Court,” Kijo said. “It’s no place for Grandma Rose.”

“At least she ain’t in a group home.”

When Uncle Clarence died, the state sent Spider to a group residence across town. After a lifetime of seeing each other every day, Kijo hadn’t seen Spider since the funeral a month earlier. He’d been so distracted by the problems at Vidal Court, he hadn’t given much thought to missing his best friend. So Kijo was surprised by the deep happiness he now felt sitting in the van next to him.

“How come you don’t just move to Bridgeport?” Spider asked.

“Grandma Rose has forty years’ worth of clients at Jojo Jeffersons,” Kijo explained, as his grandmother had explained to him each time he suggested they leave town. “She can’t just pack up and move.”

“What did you tell her you were up to today?”

“Errands,” said Kijo. In fact, Kijo had invented an elaborate story for Grandma Rose about going up to Norwalk to help Spider get his van out of a tow lot. He’d added an unnecessary bit about a caseworker who had it in for Spider and had personally impounded the van. But Kijo wasn’t a good liar, and Grandma Rose had eyed him with suspicion as he’d left the house that morning with a big duffel bag.

“Can’t lock you up for first-degree erranding,” said Spider.

“She’ll lock us up if we’re late for dinner.”

“Us?” Spider flashed a smile. “We’re the Dukes again, my man.”

Spider’s all-time favorite show was
The Dukes of Hazzard
. As a kid, he became convinced the show was about black people: “The cousins don’t got a father, right? They only got their uncle Jesse. And they’re running moonshine, trying to get out from under the foot of that whitey-in-a-white-suit Boss Hogg. The Dukes are just regular black folk trying to raise themselves up selling joy juice!”

Spider was big on uncles. After Spider’s father was sent to prison, his uncle Clarence took him in, intending to raise him well so he wouldn’t
go the way of his father. Clarence once brought Spider all the way to Washington, D.C., to see Minister Farrakhan. Clarence was the only man Kijo had ever known who dyed his hair gray so he would be looked upon more decently. He liked his gin and he liked his dice, but he loved Spider, and Kijo had nothing but respect for the man on account of that.

Kijo once made the mistake of introducing Uncle Clarence to Grandma Rose. This was back when he thought what his grandma needed was a man around the house, before Kijo understood what the aunties who sometimes stayed the night were about. Grandma Rose had said what she said about all men: that she could smell a man who hadn’t been to church in years, and Clarence wasn’t coming anywhere near her kitchen table. Uncle Clarence ended up finding Lupa, a Uruguayan woman, but they never married.

And when Uncle Clarence’s cancer killed him, Spider talked the Diamond Diagnostics people into letting him drive specimens all over Connecticut. Kijo thought he’d have a better sense of direction by now.

“We’re going in circles.”

Spider took a pull of beer, wiped his nose. “These are back roads, Kijo. They are
made
out of circles. You ever hear of a cul-de-sac? Study that map.”

Spider flicked on a bright dome light, and in the glare Kijo noticed that Spider didn’t look so good. His braids, usually thick and raised off his scalp like the legs of a spider, were limp. His skin seemed dull and there were dark circles under his eyes. Kijo knew better than to ask.

“I wanna get a GPS,” Spider said with a sigh.

“You know how much that’ll sink you?” said Kijo.

“I’ll just tell the company it’s an occupational necessity.”

Kijo knew that Spider was broke, and that he didn’t have pull with Diamond Diagnostics. They’d told him one strike—even a parking ticket—and he was out. As if he was recalling this, Spider cranked up
the radio, singing and shaking along to Jay-Z. Spider shoved a slice of pizza into his mouth, chewing hard and thinking.