“Poopy head!”
But he stayed. As I was going down the block I turned and saw him leaning against the fence. He looked real little.
Mikey looked small, but he was only four. As I walked along fast I thought about how if he kept growing and got twice as big in four more years, which would have made him the same age as I am now, he would be almost a giant.
The bodega on 138th Street is always the first store open that takes our card. Mr. Alvarez always says he shouldn’t let me use it but he always does. On the dot day, the second Tuesday of the month, when there’s more money in the account, the stores are always full. I went in and bought a dozen eggs, some chicken thighs, a loaf of bread, and a quart of orange juice. Mr. Alvarez rang them up, took the card from me, and swiped it through the machine. Then he handed the machine to me and I punched in our secret code, which was 0-3-3-5-2. I don’t know how Mama came up with that number.
I was always a little nervous when I punched in the number because I was afraid that maybe there wouldn’t be any money and we couldn’t get anything to eat. Sometimes on the last few days, before the new money came in, we would be hungry.
Mr. Alvarez put the food into a plastic bag and I took it home. Mama was still in bed. I got her medicine from the refrigerator again. Her main medicine, the one she had to take, was in a plastic strip. You had to break it to push the pill out. I took one out and poured a glass of orange juice.
“Mama!”
She opened her eyes, saw it was me, and opened her mouth. I put the pill on her tongue and she made a face as she swallowed. She sat up and drank the juice. Her pills were big and sometimes she had trouble keeping them down. Once she had thrown one up and we had to find it on the floor and she had to take it again. That was yucky.
I felt better seeing that main pill go down. She had to take another one in the afternoon. It used to be six but now the doctor had cut them down to two a day. The other pills, the ones for the rash and the one because of her habit, didn’t mean that much. They made her feel better, but the two main pills kept her from dying.
“I’m going to school,” I said. “I put some eggs and bread and the rest of the juice in the refrigerator.”
“There’s money on the card?”
“Yes,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t buy a lot of stuff on the first day.
* * *
I was late, and Mr. Griggs pointed toward the sign-in sheet.
“You don’t know what time school starts, young lady?” he asked.
“I know,” I said, signing my name under the others.
He asked me my homeroom, gave me a late pass, and waved me on down the hall. It wasn’t like I wanted to be late, and there were at least seven names ahead of mine.
Shakespeare, the class hamster, was loose and some of the girls were standing on chairs making believe they were afraid of him. Two boys had pointers and were trying to get him out from under the radiator.
“What are you doing?” I asked them. “You going to hurt him with those pointers.”
“Why don’t you shut up!” That’s what skinny-faced Marva said.
“You better shut up before you get slapped!”
Miss Goldblum was sitting at her desk like she didn’t know what to do. I crouched down on the floor, got Shakespeare, and took him back to his cage.
When the class came back to order Miss Goldblum started talking about how George Washington was elected as the first president of the United States. What she was saying was all right, but I started thinking again about moving into a big house. I had told Mikey about it so many times that I was beginning to believe it myself. Sometimes, when things weren’t going well, I would make myself stop thinking about moving. Most of the time, though, I did think about it, and made plans to fix up a new place like the houses I saw on television. When I told Mama she said I was a mess but I could go on dreaming as long as I wanted.
Along with the big house I dreamed that Mama was all right and we didn’t have to worry about things like her T-cells and making sure she took her medication. Everybody who knew what was wrong with Mama stayed away from our house. That made me feel bad, because being sick isn’t something you should have to be ashamed about.
I didn’t hear Miss Goldblum come up beside me, just some kids laughing. When I got back from thinking about Mama and the house I was going to decorate she was right by my side.
“Can you get your mind back to this class, girl?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She didn’t have to say that.
The rest of the morning went by slow but at last it was over. I was hungry. All they had for lunch was some greasy hamburgers, hard French fries, and vegetable soup. I can’t stand no greasy food but I cut up the hamburger and put it in the soup. Then I found that the soup was cold. I ate part of it, though.
I saw Mikey in the lunchroom and waved at him and he made his make-believe gang signals at me. The preschool kids couldn’t eat with the regular kids, so I couldn’t talk to him.
When the last bell rang Miss Goldblum called me over to her desk and said that I had to write twenty-five times that I would pay attention in class.
“I can’t stay after school,” I said. “My mother is sick.”
“You should have thought of that earlier.”
“You can ask the principal, but I can’t stay after school.”
“I will do just that!” she said, and we walked downstairs to the office. She told the clerk and the clerk went in and told the principal.
“Mr. Griggs says to let her go,” the clerk came back and told Miss Goldblum. “She’s needed at home.”
“Then you write it at home and you had better be on time tomorrow.” Miss Goldblum was all huffed up.
I went on home and saw that Mama was still lying on the couch but the television was on. Yeah! That meant she was feeling a little better. It was almost three-thirty, so I got her other main pill and she took it with some water.
“Where’s Mikey?”
I looked in our room and he wasn’t there. Sometimes he hides in the closet, but he wasn’t there either, and I told Mama I would go get him. Sometimes Mikey works my nerves something terrible. He’s only four but he knows our rules. Reverend Glover explained all of that to him when Mama got home from the hospital.
After school Mikey is supposed to walk down the street to Frederick Douglass Boulevard, then make a left and come straight home. Sometimes he stops and plays on the way and sometimes he stops and looks in stores. He doesn’t have any money so he can’t buy anything, but he stops and looks anyway.
Now I walked over to the boulevard as fast as I could and then started walking uptown. I got one block and I saw Mikey sitting on a stoop watching some other kids play.
“Mikey! C’mon, boy what you doing sitting here when you should have been home!” I said. “C’mon now!”
“No!” he said.
I hit him. I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes he just has to listen to me and I don’t have a lot of time to be explaining. He stood up like he was going to fight and I grabbed him and snatched him by the shirt collar. “I know where the ironing cord is!” I said.
He sniffled all the way home, and I felt bad, but I just didn’t have the time to do everything right even if it meant I had to push Mikey around. And with Mikey, if you try too hard to do it right he’ll try just as hard to mess it up.
I got home as soon as I could.
“Where were you, boy?” Mama asked Mikey.
“She hit me!”
“You needed it. You know you’re supposed to come straight home.”
That made Mikey mad and he folded his arms and stomped out of the room. I like it when he does that because it looks cute.
The homework was stupid, just some easy arithmetic, some antonyms I had to write two times each, and a brief description of a place or thing. For my place I described a big house with a big door in the front and a little door on the side in case we had a cat.
Mama put some medicated powder on her bac
k and chest, which was not a good idea because sometimes that made her itch worse than ever. I got her pill for her rash and she said that it wasn’t helping too much.
“The doctor said that he couldn’t give me anything stronger because it might affect my liver,” she said.
Suppertime. There was some old grease in the refrigerator in a can and I put some in the big frying pan. I washed the chicken, then put some flour in the plastic bag it came in and rolled the chicken around in it. Then I put some salt and pepper on it the way I saw Mama do. When the frying pan got hot I turned down the heat and put the chicken in, one piece at a time.
I put on some rice and took out a bowl of leftover peas. I was going to wait until the chicken was almost finished and then just put the peas in the frying pan. Mikey came out and looked at the stove and asked me where the macaroni and cheese was. It had just slipped my mind.
I didn’t want to go out again but I had promised Mikey. Mama said she would watch the chicken and I went down to Mr. Alvarez and got a box of macaroni and cheese for a dollar and nineteen cents. If you have money not just the card, you can get it at the ninety-nine-cents store for ninety-nine cents.
I made the macaroni and cheese for Mikey and we had supper. All during supper Mikey was holding his shoulder where I had hit him and saying how much it hurt.
Then we watched the news. Mama took her last pill of the day and asked me to put some lotion on her hands. I liked doing that and she knew it.
“Pat, don’t rub,” she said.
When I put the lotion on Mama we sat face to face and sometimes I just held her hand. We had a game to see who would smile first. Sometimes I would win and sometimes she would win.
Mama told Mikey to go to bed and he said he wasn’t sleepy.
“Oh, good,” I said. “Then I can give you a bath.”
Mikey hated baths so he went to bed. When he gets into bed he always falls asleep right away.
I had forgotten about writing “I will pay attention in class” twenty-five times, so I did that. Then I was going to wash the dishes but Mama had already done them, which was a good sign. She was on the couch again. She hadn’t pulled it out.
The television was on and I wondered if I should leave it on. Sometimes if I turned it off it would wake her up. I thought about it for a while, and then I did turn it off. I pulled the sheet up on Mama so that it covered her shoulder.
In the room Mikey was making little noises in his sleep. I imagined he was dreaming about beating me up. I hoped he wasn’t.
the life
you need
to have
“There’s a man shortage in this school.” Elena Rojas sat at a computer terminal in the Media Center. “There’s maybe only one passable guy for every three girls. And, honey I’m pushing it when I say passable.”
“We’re seniors,” Gaylee answered. “Next year it’s all about college and all the men are going to be at least passable.”
“Maybe, but you know I read they got more brothers going to jail than going to college?” Elena had been scrolling through a site showing the different styles of African hair weaving and was just closing the page. “I’m thinking about putting an ad over the Internet. Wanted: Brother with something on the ball, must be anatomically correct with fresh breath—’cause I can’t stand no man with stink breath—and a car.”
“Girl, you are a mess.” Gaylee started gathering her books for history.
“You still going away to college?” Elena asked.
“If I get a scholarship,” Gaylee answered. “And I don’t need a man to become a veterinarian.”
“You hanging out after school or you working today?”
“Working.”
They headed down the hall to class.
Mr. Siegfried’s lecture on the feudal states of Europe went by easily, but the last class of the day was endless as the teacher droned on about the beauty of medieval English poetry. Gaylee gathered her books as the buzzer went off.
The weather was warm, bordering on muggy, as she walked toward the subway and her job at the Harlem Pet Clinic on 145th Street. Her mind was far away from feudal Europe and nowhere near medieval English. It was on Malcolm Boswell.
Malcolm was, in a word, smoking. Every girl at Baldwin High had checked him out from a distance and a few had even pushed up on the fine brother. He was a little over six feet tall with a sandy brown complexion and curly hair. To Gaylee, Malcolm’s best feature was his eyes. Then there was that smile. It was an easy smile, not quite straight and not quite wide enough, but straight enough and wide enough to put a girl slightly off balance.
All of her sophomore year Gaylee had hoped he would notice her, but Malcolm had been too busy playing basketball and being the manager of the school’s newspaper to pay attention to the tall thin girl with acne and an inclination to being slightly clumsy. But—and here came the good part—when the PSAT scores had been posted two weeks earlier for the junior class and Gaylee Brown’s name had been printed in bold letters as one of the top three students, Malcolm had actually asked her to take in a film with him.
“This Saturday?” she had asked, squinting her eyes as if she were wondering if she was free Saturday. “Oh, all right.”
She had been so excited she had sat in the Media Center and gone over exactly what Malcolm had said three times to make sure she had it right before she told Elena.
“He probably looked at you and was thinking to himself that you’re pretty and you have class,” Elena said. “You know his folks have money and they are mucho sophisticated.”
“You think I should act super-classy or something?”
“Just be yourself, girl,” Elena answered. “He came knocking on your door, baby.”
Saturday came in a flash and Gaylee was impressed when Malcolm hailed a cab to go downtown. The theater was on Houston Street, one of those complexes in which they showed three foreign films and two American joints. Malcolm suggested they check out one of the foreign films.
“You don’t mind subtitles, do you?”
“No,” Gaylee said, even though she knew she would have to wear her glasses.
They were early for the film Malcolm wanted to see and found seats in the theater’s coffee shop. While Malcolm was ordering two cappuccinos Gaylee started checking off her mental score card.
Malcolm had mentioned her test scores, which probably meant he thought her being intelligent meant something. Boys didn’t usually like girls whose averages hovered near 3.6.
He had also not asked her to the mall, which could have been either positive or negative. For Gaylee the mall was a perfect drag. But maybe he just didn’t want to be seen with her. Still, she was on a date, one of the few she’d had in three years of high school. Okay, the second she’d had during the three years. Ever. It all seemed good.
The movie was The Fast Runner. It was interesting, about an Inuit tribe and how they lived way up in the arctic regions. But the most interesting part of the movie had been when Malcolm took her hand and held it, both of their hands on her lap.
Malcolm’s hand on her lap completely stopped her from thinking about the movie. Later, when they had stood in the hallway of her building and he was saying goodbye, his smile pushing up her blood pressure as she leaned against the tiled walls, she was almost giddy with excitement.
He thanked her, brushed a kiss across her lips, and disappeared into the night, leaving her breathless and off balance. But he hadn’t called back.
“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” she told Elena the following week. “I guess it was just a casual way for him to spend an evening.”
“Track his butt down and cuff him!” Elena said. “You ever see how they catch those dudes on Cops? They follow every lead until they get their man and then they drag him away in handcuffs. As hard as men are to find these days, that’s what you got to do, girl.”
But Gaylee hadn’t tracked Malcolm down. Instead she watched as he went about the business of being all everything and just
a tad—was it possible?—better-looking. In the meanwhile she had concentrated on getting into the best college she could and had settled on Auburn, in Alabama.
“Why you going to Alabama?” Elena had asked. “You got people down there?”
“They have a really good biology program,” Gaylee had answered. “And one of the best veterinary schools in the country.”
“Did I tell you I was thinking of going to the University of Puerto Rico?” Elena asked. “Then I found out that you had to speak high-class Spanish and I decided against it.”
The truth was that Gaylee wasn’t that sure about Auburn, but they had offered her the best scholarship. She had completely shifted her thoughts to education and away from her nonexistent social life when the phone rang on a Wednesday evening in April at exactly seven minutes past eight.
“Malcolm,” the voice announced in a smooth baritone. “Malcolm Boswell. How are you?”
“I’m good,” Gaylee answered. “How are you doing?”
“Not sure,” Malcolm said. “I think I’m going through one of those life-changing experiences. What are they called? Epiphanies? I was wondering if I could talk to you about some things?”
Yes! Sure! Of course, darling! she thought.
“Oh, okay,” she said.
He asked her to go with him to the Studio Museum in Harlem. That Thursday they met in front of a large abstract sculpture that looked vaguely like a prehistoric bird flying over a black ball that could have represented the earth. Or something.
“So what did he say?” Elena asked later.
“Well, he said he was thinking about his life, what he really wanted and all, and what he was doing with it right now. He’s been accepted to four colleges with a full ride to three of them. Did you know he had actually been thinking about Auburn?”
“Get out of here!”
“He said he applied there after he heard that I had. Later he started putting two and two together and remembering how good he had felt about our date and how he was thinking he wanted to go out with a girl who was doing something with her life.”
“And that’s you up and down, honey!”