The Believers (18 page)

Raphael raised a hand. "May I, Laura?" He smiled at Chianti. "I want to ask you a question. Can you tell me what sort of things you would
like
to be doing at GirlPower?"

Chianti picked at the seam of her jeans. "I dunno."

"Well, think about it. What wouldn't be stupid stuff?"

Chianti was silent.

"This isn't a trick question," Raphael said. "I'm just trying to figure out what activities you would enjoy. I know you like dancing, right?"

"Yeah."

Raphael turned to Laura. "How would it be if we organized a dancing session a couple of times a week? Would that be okay?"

"I don't see why not."

"What do you think about that, Chianti?" Raphael asked. "Maybe you could be in charge of the choreography."

Chianti raised her head warily. "For real?"

"Hold on," Laura said. "For any of this to happen, you'd have to do a lot of work to clean up your act. We'd need to see perfect attendance and punctuality from you. We'd need a new, positive attitude. No sass, no smoking, no nothing. Do you think you could give us that?"

Chianti nodded her head.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"You understand, we're putting a lot of trust in you, Chianti. The first time we see you messing up--not coming in when you're meant to, backchatting the counselors, whatever--the whole dance thing goes away, right?"

"Right."

"How does this sound to you, Mrs. Gates?"

The corners of Mrs. Gates's lips turned down in an expression of grudging acquiescence. "So long as she's not messing in the street with boys."

"Well, okay!" Laura said, clapping her hands. "I think we have a plan. I want to see you here tomorrow morning, Chianti, at nine o'clock. Not ten past or quarter past. Nine on the dot. And then we can start brainstorming about how to put a dance group together."

Walking to the subway, Raphael was in a buoyant mood. "That worked out pretty good, huh?"

"Sure," Rosa replied, "if you don't count the fact that Mrs. Gates nearly fractured her daughter's skull."

Raphael giggled. "Man! She's a piece of work, isn't she?"

"She's a monster," Rosa said passionately. "If she's prepared to smack her daughter around like that in public, can you imagine what she's like at home?"

"Well, she cared enough to turn up. That's something."

Rosa widened her eyes in mock amazement. "My God, Raph, you're right! Let's notify the 'Mother of the Year Awards' immediately."

"What bug got up
your
ass?" Raphael asked.

Rosa shook her head. "I don't know."

They had turned onto 110th Street now. On the north side of the street, a group of men were lolling sweatily on the steps of a single room occupancy hotel, muttering lazy hostilities at one another. On the south side, behind the boundary railings of Central Park, two little boys were fishing in Harlem Meer.

"I'm just not sure I see the point," Rosa said, suddenly. "It's like we're all sitting around, killing ourselves trying to figure out ways to keep Chianti with us. And part of me feels that it doesn't really matter if she stays or goes."

Raphael made a puzzled face, "Are you kidding? Of course it matters. It matters a lot. If she stays in, she's less likely to become pregnant, less likely to start taking drugs, more likely to get decent grades--"

"Yeah, yeah," Rosa said impatiently. "I know. I know all that. But she's not really going to...I mean, there's so much about her life that is messed up and that we're never going to change."

"What, the fact that she's got a scary mom?"

"No, not that. Well, not
just
that. I mean--"

"No, I know what you're saying. There's always more to be done. But you can't let yourself get hung up on that. You have to focus on one day at a time and the small improvements you're making. Otherwise you just get overwhelmed."

"Yes, but Raph, the small improvements are
so
small."

A note of exasperation entered Raphael's voice now. "I don't know what you're getting at. We're just one little program--"

"Exactly. We're just one little program. Maybe we keep them off drugs for a while, and maybe we defer pregnancy for a few years, but they still have shitty parents and they still go to shitty schools and they're still going to end up with shitty jobs, or no jobs. Their"--she made an expansive gesture with her arms--"their class destiny is still going to be the same."

Raphael stopped and leaned his head back. "Class destiny?" He began to laugh. "
Class destiny?
Rosa, you're buggin' out, man! Come here, you need a hug."

Rosa shook her head, offended. But Raphael reached out and pulled her to him. "Crazy woman," he murmured. Rosa breathed in the warm dampness of his polo shirt. It smelled pleasantly of spray starch and fresh sweat.

"You take things too seriously, Ro," Raphael said, stroking her hair. "It's not good for you, I swear."

CHAPTER
10

Karla was sitting in her office cubicle, examining a thick ring-bound booklet from the BabyLove Adoption Agency of New York State. On its front cover, there was a line drawing of an infant in swaddling and beneath that, the slogan, "BabyLove: Bringing New York Families Together for Fourteen Years."

Two days earlier, she and Mike had attended an orientation meeting at BabyLove. They had been shown a short film titled
Adoption: A Journey of Love
, and afterward they had been taken into an office for a preliminary interview. Their adoption counselor, Michelle, had been wearing tiny pearl studs in her ears and a silk scarf knotted around her neck in the air stewardess style. She had begun by outlining the basic stages of what she promised would be "a long and sometimes challenging process" and then she had asked Karla and Mike to share with her their reasons for wanting to adopt a child. Karla, alert to the irony of her position--a social worker being social-worked--had been determined to acquit herself well. "It's me, actually," she confessed cheerfully. "I can't have them."

"Right--," Michelle said.

"And also we like the idea of giving a child a good home," Mike added.

"That's wonderful. There are certainly a lot of children out there who need good homes. But I was actually hoping to hear a little more about your personal expectations of parenthood. Do you think you could both be specific about what you're hoping to get from the experience of raising a child? Karla?"

Karla cleared her throat. "Well..."

She paused. She and Mike had been "trying" for so long that the thing for which they were trying had become a rather abstract notion. Karla had never been one of those childless women who cast covetous glances at strollers in parks and moaned sadly over receiving blankets in layette stores. Mike's fecund female relatives were always inviting her, in honeyed tones of compassion, to "hold" their infants, but she rarely accepted their offers. The truth was that babies--real, drooling, oozing babies--frightened her a little.

She became aware of Mike's knee juddering with impatience next to hers. She looked at him and then at Michelle with a growing sense of doom. She could not summon up a single reason why she wanted to be a mother.

"I'm sorry," she said, shaking her head, "I'm having a bit of trouble with this."

Michelle smiled. "Don't worry. It's a very big question. These things can sometimes be hard to put into words. Take your time."

Something about her sibilant, whispery way of talking made Karla feel injured and tearful. There was another long silence. "I've always wanted to be a mother," Karla said at last, "because...I love kids, and I think raising one would be very fulfilling. Kids," she added despairingly, "are so much fun."

"Okaay..." Michelle turned to Mike. "Do you have anything you'd like to add?"

Karla glanced at him imploringly.
Please be nice
.
Please don't say "mute point."

"I guess," Mike said, smoothing back his hair, "my reasons for wanting to be a parent have to do with the kind of childhood my own parents gave me. I grew up in Pelham Park with two brothers and two sisters and loads of cousins living nearby. Our house was very loud and busy. Very warm, you know? Always filled with people and laughter."

Karla glanced at Michelle, who was nodding faster and faster as Mike spoke. She felt a childish pang of envy. Mike was acing the test.

"My dad was crazy about baseball, and we used to have these big family games in the park on weekends. My mom was more gentle. Even when we got to be teenagers, she sang us lullabies every night. She had this amazing voice. Probably, if she hadn't been a mom, she could have been a professional singer.... So, anyway, I guess I have very happy memories of growing up. And when I think of being a parent, I think of giving those things back to my kids."

Going home, afterward, Karla apologized for her poor performance. "I don't know what happened. I totally messed up, I'm sorry.
You
, though--you were great in there! So eloquent!"

Mike stared at her reproachfully. "I wasn't being
eloquent
, Karla," he said. "I was being
real
."

Karla put away the adoption booklet now and began tidying up her desk. She and Mike were going out for dinner this evening with his cousin and his cousin's wife; she had promised Mike she would not be late.

Downstairs in the lobby, Khaled the newspaper man was in the process of closing up his shop. "Come in for a minute," he said, beckoning from the doorway.

Karla shook her head. "I shouldn't. I've got to get home."

"Go on."

She smiled "All right. Just a minute, then."

A month or so had passed since the fiasco of Karla and Khaled's first meeting. They had eaten lunch together in the garden several times since then, and lately, he had taken to stopping by her office when he was making his delivery rounds. To Karla, whose social circle was composed almost entirely of union activists and other social progressives, this new friendship was a bemusing development. Khaled was oblivious, as far as she could tell, to current affairs, domestic or foreign. (Apart from the astrology and sports sections, he didn't really read the newspapers.) He had no interest in the union and did not bother to hide his indifference when she spoke of it. To the extent that he had politics at all, she strongly suspected that they were reactionary. And yet she liked him. She enjoyed his company and looked forward to seeing him. In spite of, or perhaps because of, their lack of shared interests, they seemed to have bypassed the prescribed stages for polite coworker relations and advanced straight to the free-flowing, aimless talk of intimates. Often, in his company, she felt a weight lifting from her--a burden of cares whose heaviness she had not fully realized.

Inside the store, Egyptian pop music was playing on a cassette player. Khaled pulled out a stool from behind the counter and gestured for Karla to sit down. "Are you hungry?" he asked.

"No, I've eaten."

"Wait." He disappeared into his stockroom.

Karla sat swinging her legs. On the counter next to her there was a revolving stand filled with miniature sewing kits and eyeglass-mending kits. She gave it a little spin. "What is this music?" she called out.

"This is a very famous Egyptian singer," Khaled said, returning with two cans of apple juice and a brown paper bag. "She's maybe the most famous of all."

"Ah."

He began to sing along in a funny, high-pitched voice, imitating a seductive female dance.

"You're in a good mood tonight," she said.

"You've put me in a good mood." He danced over to the plastic bucket in which he kept cellophaned bunches of flowers. "Here, take some of these."

She shook her head. "I don't need flowers."

"I know you don't
need
them," he said. "I just want you to have some." He held the bouquet in his outstretched fist, like the Statue of Liberty with her torch.

She took them. "Thanks."

"Look at this." Khaled opened up the paper bag he had put on the counter and brought out a slab of halva. "I got it from the Greek place round the corner. You want some?"

"I shouldn't, really."

He glanced at her with comic skepticism.

"All right then. Just a tiny bit."

Khaled loved to buy treats for himself. Whenever Karla saw him, he seemed to be eating, or preparing to eat, something delicious: a doughnut covered in soft, white icing; a fat Chinese dumpling shaped like a miniature sack of burglars' swag; a juicy clementine, rattling in its baggy, pocked jacket. She was slightly shocked by his guiltless public gorging. She had been surrounded all her life by people who were either indifferent or actively hostile to food, and eating was for her a solitary vice. Her mother had never really cooked so much as thrust nominally edible items onto the table and demanded that they not be "wasted." Mike drank protein shakes for lunch and wouldn't let anything pass his lips after six o'clock, for fear that he wouldn't metabolize it before he slept. ("Some people live to eat; I eat to live," he was always saying, as if his rejection of pleasure were a personal badge of honor.)

She watched as Khaled carved the halva. The black hair on his forearm curled around his watch strap and lapped at a glossy, bubble-gum-colored scar that was peeping out from his rolled-up sleeve.

"It's ugly, no?" He said suddenly, gesturing at the scar with his knife.

Karla reddened. "No! Not at all. I was just wondering how you...How did you get it? If you don't mind saying."

"I was playing in the kitchen one time when I was a kid. My mother had hot fat on the stove, and I knocked the pan off."

"Oh!" Karla felt a great wave of tenderness for Khaled's injured childhood self. "That must have been terrible."

He handed her a slice of halva. "I guess. My mother says I cried for two days, but I don't remember it." He glanced down at a magazine that was lying on the counter and began flicking through its pages. "Look at this." He pointed to a photographic spread of a celebrity's mansion in the Hollywood Hills. "This is the house I want to live in some day."

Karla examined the magazine with a small grimace of disapproval.

"See that?" he said. "That's a fish tank with a real shark in it. Right in the guy's living room!"

"Poor shark," she murmured.

"Wait. This guy has his own movie theater."

Karla glanced at a photograph of a velvet-lined screening room. "It's a bit selfish, though, isn't it?" she said. "I mean, for one person to take up that much space."

"It's his money. He can spend it how he wants."

"Yes, but it would be nice if he did something more useful with it, I think."

Khaled put the magazine down, disappointed. "He probably gives a lot of money to charity."

Karla looked away, suddenly disgusted with her own sententiousness. What a bore she was, spoiling his harmless daydreams with her Goody Two-shoes lectures!

"Do you want some more halva?" he asked.

"No." She held up her hands in a gesture of satiety. "I should go soon."

"Are you visiting your father tonight?"

"No. I'm going out for dinner with my husband's cousin and his wife."

"Ah," Khaled said, nodding. "That's nice."

"We're going to a Mexican place."

"Huh." He stared gloomily at the counter.

Karla wondered at the sudden change in his mood. She must have irritated him with her refusal to be excited by the celebrity's house. "This song is nice," she said, anxious to redeem herself. "What's it about?"

"She's singing about missing her lover."

"Oh."

"She's saying, 'Come back, come back. Without you I am like a boat on dry land.'" He began to dance again now, holding out his hand to Karla.

She shook her head. "I'm not a dancer."

"Oh, sure you are," he said, grasping her hand. For a brief moment, Karla let herself be swayed stiffly from side to side.

"See," Khaled murmured, "you
are
a dancer."

In the glass front of the store's refrigerator, Karla caught a glimpse of herself: a fat woman, jiggling foolishly on a stool. "That's enough!" she said sharply, pulling her hand away from Khaled's.

He stepped back in surprise.

"Sorry," she said. "I just--"

"No, no, don't apologize.
I'm
sorry." He reached up and turned off the music. Out of the sudden quiet came the distant thunder of a floor-polishing machine in the hospital lobby.

"I should go." Karla stepped down from the stool and shook out her skirt.

Khaled watched her unhappily. "Will you come by tomorrow?"

"Maybe. I'll see."

"Don't forget your flowers."

"No, of course not."

Outside in the hospital driveway, Karla stopped to stuff Khaled's bouquet in a giant green "Keep New York Clean" trash can. It was an awful waste, but she felt silly walking along the street, holding flowers. And in any case, she would not have known how to explain them to Mike.