Delicious Foods (5 page)

He passed, pretending not to notice her. After walking fifty more yards, he stopped and returned to the bus shelter. He stood away from her, watching her light a cigarette and toss the lit match casually into the street. The woman squinted at him, took a drag, and blew her smoke. The expression she sent his way—brows close together, mouth pursed—made him feel that he had offended her.

No, sugar, she said. Ain’t happening. She leaned out of the shelter and craned her neck in the opposite direction. Mm-mm. You too young.

I’m not that young, he announced. I’m almost twelve.

She took a step back and guffawed, and he saw her sympathy for him break open. What is happening to me? she asked the sky. I can’t believe I thought—she shook her head and sucked on the cigarette again. Good God A’mighty. Eleven years old. And what you doing out—

I’m looking for my mother, he blurted.

The gravity of the matter seemed to settle in her body, as if the same thing had once happened to her. Oh, it’s like that, she said. She on the street, hmm?

I reckon. I’m not sure where she is, ma’am.

The name Darlene Hardison did not sound familiar to the woman. Out here, she said, a lot of people—the names aren’t the names, you know. What she look like?

Like a normal mom.

You gotta do better than that, my dear. How tall, how fat, how black. Big boobs, small boobs, big ass—what her hair like? Natural, straight, weave, dye? Scars, tattoos. What she was wearing. Who she was with.

Nothing helpful came to mind. Vague adjectives orbited his head.
Pretty. Nice.
If he didn’t find her that night, he would need a picture. He struggled to create an image of his mother with his undeveloped tools, and watched his failure reflected in the woman’s blank expression. He could not handle this alone, but he didn’t let that thought enter his awareness. He had to hold back a riot in his chest that made him want to shout, or kick the bus shelter, or himself.

A gleaming white town car slowed at the bus stop. The woman broke Eddie’s gaze, flicked her unfinished cigarette to the ground, smashed it into the pavement, and leaned her torso into the window of the car. Loud rap music from inside drowned out their conversation. A voice whined,
Don’t believe the hype!
Presently the woman turned back and smiled. This my ride. She swung the door wide, leapt in, and slammed it. In Eddie’s imagination she became his mother, who might have done the same things, recklessly stepping over the line into danger, into oblivion, and—worse than wrapping herself in a stranger’s murderous arms, worse than dying—leaving him behind.

Only then did a vivid picture of his mother come to him. Slim, her edges round like a soap sculpture in the rain, fuller hips than her frame seemed able to support. She straightened her hair and kept it at shoulder length. She wore sleeveless floral sundresses in muted patterns and flat shoes—in particular he remembered a mustard-colored pair. At the old house, in Ovis, she would garden from October to May, when it wasn’t too hot to spend time in the yard, and she dreamed of getting a sprinkler system for the lawn. He remembered eating a certain brand of chocolate sandwich cookie that matched her complexion, not the deep brown of stained wood but lighter and ruddier, like cedar-bark chips. She had grace, and painted her finger- and toenails a respectable shade of plum. A night sky of faint dots spread across her face, maybe from an adolescent ’bout with acne. He remembered sitting in her lap and tracing these constellations while she slapped his hands away. The makeup she used always compensated for the spots. These were some of Eddie’s earliest memories, which always gradually gave way to something else, as if Darlene had pulled a zipper and the halves of her body had fallen away, like a husk, to unmask another person.

This mental image lasted only as long as the flashing red sign that told him not to walk. Hazier still was the gap between that image and the woman he couldn’t find that night. Eddie’s father had also disappeared, nearly six years earlier, and they’d found him dead. During the Vietnam War, he knew, his father had flown an airplane, and after that, in college, he had played basketball. Eddie’s father must have done his job as a soldier well because he wore a medal in the shape of a silver star over his heart in that photograph near his mother’s bed. That’s for bravery, his mother had said, so often that he could say it with her. Charlie didn’t get your daddy, no sir. He had to come home to Jim Crow for that. Then she’d laugh, but not a funny laugh.

Eddie did a lot of asking that night. He encountered many peculiar people, etched in fluorescent light outside ratty convenience stores, walking across empty parking lots whose fault lines sprouted crabgrass and sparkled with nuggets of safety glass, peeking from inside dark concrete motel rooms with broken doors. Nobody remembered Darlene; some people did not know if they remembered remembering. Others forgot that they did not remember. Some spoke fast, for a very long time, and did not stop. Some people could not form words.

One skinny lady with sunken eyes claimed that she definitely had seen Darlene. Without question, she said, absolutely, on this very road. But she also insisted that it had happened ten years ago. We shared a slice of pizza, she went on, because we only had enough money for one, and your moms wanted olives on it, I member that clearly, and we had a little argument about that because I hate olives.

Eddie somehow knew not to mention that his mother also hated olives.

Minimart clerks at gas stations shrugged, a man in a tool belt who claimed to be an electrician said he lived two hours away in Nacogdoches, and a nervous man with slick black hair and a tattoo of his dead Rottweiler on his naked pec kept reaching into the small of his back and telling Eddie, You better go home, kid, ’cause shit’s finna go down right the fuck here, son. He pointed to the ground with both index fingers. Eddie met two kids younger than himself who wanted money for a Butterfinger. At first they threatened him verbally, but after he turned his pockets inside out and explained his journey, one of them offered to help him find his mother. Eddie declined, and as he walked away sideways, it occurred to him that nobody else had volunteered to help. Two or three dark sedans slowed by the roadside, powering down their tinted passenger-side windows. Eddie ran from them.

On his second night of searching, drawn to the bright pink and orange of a 24-hour donut shop, he thought he might finally find people inside who would not only know and remember but also know
what
they knew and remember what they remembered, and have some of it turn out true. He understood that he couldn’t rely on the night people, who frightened and angered him, and he experienced a deep burn in his stomach when he thought about how his mother had joined them or died with them, like his father, and at best they had engulfed her and made her vanish into this ruined land where true and false didn’t matter, where the differences disappeared among memories, dreams, and a young man standing in front of them asking a desperate question.

N
ot long after Darlene arrived at Grambling State University, she gained a sorority sister, Hazel, who transferred in from Florida State. Hazel had a vivacious, confrontational attitude, fueled by her determination to override the social strikes against her—a mahogany complexion, features too small to fit her face, a large mole muscling in on her nose, unusual height for a woman, a tough demeanor.

All this Southern gentility baffles me, Hazel sometimes said. I always feel like I’m playing the trumpet at a tea party. She made up for her brashness with camaraderie. Hazel organized the group’s bowling outings, oversaw the decoration of the house, and made an astounding barbecued brisket packed with smokiness. Her flowing red-and-turquoise blouses often had African designs or palm trees printed on them, and the loud clothing seemed to complement her frank conversation—often about her main vices, chocolate, bourbon, and sex—and her bawdy sense of humor. Everybody took to her, especially several doe-like, unremarkable Sigma Tau Tau sisters, and Darlene, who, as she grew into womanhood, joined Hazel’s shocked but delighted audience and found it hard to avoid imitating her infectious insolence. April Woods, a light-skinned, straight-nosed, and polite senior beauty queen, served the function of official role model, but Hazel’s charisma got everybody wearing brighter clothing. She loosened their tongues, their attitudes, and their belts.

Hazel ignored her presumed lack of status and thereby overcame it. She accepted herself and demanded reciprocation as the price of her esteem. In association with these strong values, a sense of moral outrage ran like an underground stream through her sense of humor. She took the greatest delight in skewering hypocrites and had immediate and unforgiving scorn for anyone who gave even the appearance of doing something unethical for personal gain. At one point, Tanya Humphrey (It’s
Tan
-ya, not
Tahn
-ya, she would say) insisted that Sigma tap Jamalya Raudigan, a notoriously self-involved cheerleader whose father ran a black Atlanta law firm where Tanya aspired to intern, and in the middle of a potluck supper, Hazel quieted everybody, stood on a coffee table, and told Tanya, Stop promoting this annoying social climber because you want to work for Curtis, Gitlin, Raudigan, and Sindell. When Hazel exposed your failings, she made you feel like she’d stuck a blowtorch full of truth up your nose. Rarely did she turn her anger on a sister, but everybody knew not to butt heads with such a sharp-tongued, obstinate powerhouse.

More than one Grambling linebacker had called Hazel a lesbian, though never to her face, and the notion that it might be so rumbled under Hazel’s frequent complaints about men and was tacitly reinforced by her perpetual singleness. Darlene had heard these rumors about Hazel and had listened to her comments about men, head cocked in wonder. While she didn’t completely believe what everybody said, she accepted the possibility. In those sophomore days, in the rare instances when her friends said the word
lesbian,
it was always a slur, never a person.

All the Alphas had to suppress their shock when Hazel took up with Nat, an impossibly attractive tall man who moved with the alien grace of a praying mantis. He played forward on the Tigers’ basketball team, a trail of comparisons to Willis Reed spilling out behind him. His rank as a slightly older guy with experience added to his mystique—he’d come to school on the GI Bill a couple of years after serving a tour of duty in Vietnam and had just entered his junior year.

It took Nat three tries to convince Darlene to walk off campus with him after their economics class to a greasy-spoon diner that other students rarely visited. She made excuses until his third request. A number of possibilities stampeded through her head: Maybe he wanted her econ notes, so he had decided to sweet-talk them out of her. Perhaps he had no idea that it would look bad, and the choice of restaurant wasn’t deliberate. Or possibly he intended to woo her behind Hazel’s back. At the center of these possibilities stood the man himself: the supple-spined number 55, with feminine lashes ringing his amber eyes; a fine-looking, bashful guy whose many sensitive questions and attentive gaze had probably invited fantasies of marriage in even the most sensible of her Sigma sisters. He palmed basketballs easily, and Darlene enjoyed thinking of those big hands wrapping her hips or cupping her breasts, her nipples pinched between his long fingers. His solar charisma shocked her thinking so dramatically that anything capable of keeping them apart—even Hazel—became irrelevant.

The second time Darlene went with him to the diner, he made his intentions clear by brushing her bare arm with his knuckles, and though she sensed the wrongness of the caress and felt stirrings of the potential havoc it would cause in her sorority, she couldn’t avoid relating to Nat the way all the sisters did, as a grand prize only an idiot would refuse. Under the table, her leg relaxed, slid against Nat’s, and rested there as a testament to her surrender. The next time they saw each other, they walked farther off campus, and in the lot behind a different restaurant, when they recognized their luscious privacy at the same moment, their faces drew together instinctively and their mouths and tongues connected with slippery, illicit delight.

The secret dalliance inflated her—it practically pulled her skin taut with joy. Her roommates noticed and told her she had the flushed look of someone obsessed; they poked her waist and demanded information so personal that she blushed and hid from them in the library. She would have had a very difficult time keeping such juicy information from the girls with whom she shared lipstick, pomade, blouses, stockings, and class notes, and with whom she usually initiated long conferences after a mere glance from a fly athlete.

At other times, she wanted them to know. Her roommate, Kenyatta, wouldn’t give her any peace, and Darlene finally confessed, careful to emphasize that they had only kissed.

Kenyatta’s face went flat at first, then developed into terror.

Aren’t you happy for me? Darlene asked.

No, Kenyatta told her, this is not good. This is
very
not good.

Vertigo overtook Darlene, and she swiftly understood how they’d view everything. Nat, the man, the basketball star, wouldn’t bear the responsibility, only Darlene, the slut, the man-thieving heifer, regardless of whatever credit she might have with her sisters. When it came to romantic betrayal, they’d give her no breaks.

Then just don’t tell, she begged Kenyatta. Forget I told you.

I’m sorry, these girls gon find out one way or another. Lord knows I can’t keep a secret, neither. Better if it happens sooner than later for all involved. Why you had to tell me, anyway?

No, Kenyatta, don’t. You can’t. Please.

Tau Taus can’t be beating other Tau Taus’ time. You know that.

Kenyatta would never have considered keeping the secret as an act of mercy. In choosing her as a confidante, Darlene had forgotten Kenyatta’s loyalty to the inflexible pecking order of the group, which required that the girls regularly submit their most fashionable clothes to April for approval before dances; though April’s motivation for this ritual remained unspoken, everybody said the reason was that she wanted to keep anyone from upstaging her. Often April would cherry-pick her entire outfit from the best of the lot.

Darlene, petrified, could only wait until someone passed the bad news to Hazel herself. Until then she tried to keep her distance—but not from Nat, with whom she frequently met in the evening on shady residential streets or in parks, where nobody would take note of two dark figures pressed against a tree trunk, their lips conjoined, their hands traveling ardently over each other’s bodies.

During that time, she remained on edge, constantly ready for the inevitable confrontation. She envisioned hair-pulling, so she got her hair cut a little shorter, tied it tightly behind her head in a tiny bun. But nothing happened. Kenyatta claimed not to have told, despite her declarations of allegiance to Sigma Tau Tau, and when Darlene crossed paths with Hazel, she couldn’t detect any signs of vengefulness—no eyes narrowed, no mouth corner raised, not a single oddly placed or ambiguous word in her conversation. Paradoxically, when they returned to campus after the winter break, Hazel’s conversations with Darlene seemed to take on a more familiar tone than usual, a crisp lightness like the very infrequent morning frost.

Hazel played on the women’s varsity basketball team. On the one hand it made her seem a good match for Nat; on the other it inflamed the rumors about her sexuality. One weekend when she had an away game, Darlene and Nat met at an expensive bed-and-breakfast an hour away, in Shreveport, intent on going all the way.

The place had a lush atmosphere, with antique, wallpapered rooms named for Renaissance painters and a deep, putty-colored Jacuzzi recessed into a wood-paneled alcove in the deluxe suites. Nat had requested the Botticelli Room, he told her, but only the Raphael was available.

Fifty more dollars per night, he said, but you’re worth much more than that.

Immediately on arrival, they made gasping, feverish, and clumsy love for the first time in the dry bowl of the Jacuzzi, then Nat playfully hosed the two of them down with the shower attachment and bathed their partially clothed bodies. The evaporating water tickled them as they air-dried, and flushed Darlene with a creamy sense of well-being. Lying exhausted on the comforter, they peeled off the rest of their clothing. They held each other’s faces and basked in the buttery warmth of skin against skin.

Once they tired of such luxury, they agreed to go to dinner. The thought seemed to Darlene almost as outrageous as their lovemaking. They had once run into one of Nat’s teammates at their off-campus diner and become paranoid about being seen together in public, creating the appearance of what happened to be true, but this far from campus they found an alternate universe in which their desires could thrive. Darlene started to find their increasing anxiety silly and frustrating. No one really belongs to anyone else, she thought as they locked up the Raphael and descended the Victorian’s lopsided staircase. Your heart takes you on a journey. People move around of their own free will nowadays. Women are liberated—it’s all over the news, in the sitcoms, on everybody’s lips. If people choose to be together, they agree on the terms.

She accepted this idea even though she detested the thought of sharing Nat with Hazel, now that she’d admitted to falling in love. Hazel, she sensed, without thinking the words, would most likely see his infidelity as confirmation of her belief that men—black men in particular—had no scruples, and finding out about their affair might encourage her to drop Nat and try women, if she hadn’t already. A crueler, foggier portion of Darlene’s imagination wondered if, for the girls’ basketball team, an away game didn’t imply a whole lot of late-night bed-hopping anyway. Yes, people were free to do as they pleased with whomever they wished. Men couldn’t own slaves, or servants—they couldn’t even own women anymore. And women had never owned men, that’s for sure.

They entered the foyer, where Darlene stood marveling at the front door, a magnificent original with its pastel-colored stained glass restored to glory, until Nat took her hand and guided her across the shadowy verandah. She basked in the fantasy of wealth and romance almost as much as in the incredible sense that for this weekend they belonged together, that the beauty and elegance of this moment was pleading with them to turn it into their everyday reality.

They arrived at the front steps—only ten or so. Still, she exclaimed that she couldn’t see well enough to descend them without breaking her neck, so he stood in front of her to demonstrate the location of each one. As the sky became visible to her above his head, silhouetting him against a tapestry of sickle-shaped clouds, contrails, and faint stars, this profound gesture of help framed his character so perfectly that she leapt momentarily into the future, to their possible daughter’s wedding day, when she would speak to the crowd about this moment of kindness and use it to define their relationship.

At which point a familiar voice slashed through the dark. The person had been sitting in one of the wicker chairs on the verandah, Darlene realized with a start, carefully and motionlessly positioned in a corner where a high laurel on the other side of the railing created an impenetrable shadow. Probably not even breathing.

The fuck is this? the voice said. Y’all think you’re fucking slick?

Hazel peeled out of the darkness as they turned their necks. She stood akimbo behind and above them. Kenyatta told me, but I didn’t believe her, ’cause she’s so trifling. I guess my girl got some cred after all.

Darlene’s and Nat’s hands fell to their sides like they’d suddenly regressed to embarrassed children. Nat opened his mouth and made an
uh
sound, ready to justify everything with his deep voice, a resonant bass that could smother anything unpleasant in molasses. Darlene stepped to one side, hoping to stay irrelevant to the discussion for as long as she could.

Didn’t you have an away game? Nat asked stupidly.

Canceled at the last minute, Hazel said. Turned the bus around. I got back just in time to follow your ass out here. Almost ran out of gas. Nice place.
Real
nice. When were you planning to take
me
to some Renaissance bed-and-breakfasts?

Listen, Hazel—

Don’t even, she snapped. She stepped forward into a position where the evening light cut diagonally across her torso like a sash. There’s no bullshit you can say to me that will make this not this. She waved a hand back and forth dismissively and ended by raising a finger into Nat’s personal space. So do not let it escape your lips.

He said it anyway: Hazel, Hazel. We’re just friends, honestly.

She repeated his words, mockingly, in the voice of a cartoon character, then hauled back and slugged him in the chin. Hazel’s fist packed a lot of force and speed. Nat raised his arms too late to block her jab. He stumbled at the stairs and lunged for the railing but lost his footing and tumbled to the pavement, twisting his ankle.