Disappearing Acts (44 page)

The day before they was coming home, she called.

“I miss you, baby,” I said.

“I miss you too, Franklin. Has anyone called me?”

“Like who?”

“Like a woman named JayJay?”

“Naw. Who’s that?”

“I’ll tell you when I get home. Love you, and see you tomorrow.”

I made sure the pad was spotless, so she wouldn’t have nothing to complain about. I couldn’t concentrate on my work for thinking about her. And right after lunch, I made a big mistake. Somebody was passing a bottle, and I started sipping. Then I took a break and went across the street and bought my own. By two o’clock, I was damn near seeing double. And when a slab of Sheetrock slipped out my hands and I fell back and it landed on my goddamn knee, it was all over. I couldn’t walk.

I don’t remember who took me to the emergency room, and I don’t remember how I got home. All I know is that when I woke up, I was in my own bed, had a cast on my leg, and Zora was standing over me.

“Franklin! What happened to you?” she asked. She laid Jeremiah down. For me. She put him down for me.

“I got hurt on the job, baby, and I missed you. I missed you so bad,” I said.

She walked around to my side of the bed and put her arms around me. Then she kissed me everywhere she could on my face. “Are you really okay, Franklin, for real?”

“I don’t know, baby, I don’t know.”

“Can I get you anything? Does it hurt anywhere? Are you in pain?”

“Just right there,” I said, pointing. “It hurts there.”

“Would you like a pillow under it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A pillow would be fine.”

“Are you hungry? Did they give you something for the pain?”

“Yeah, I took it already. But come here. Lay down here next to me and keep me warm.”

She put Jeremiah in his bassinet and came over and laid down next to me. She put her arms around me again, and I put my head between her breasts. I exhaled and dug my head in deeper.

“You been gone too long,” I said.

“Well, I’m back,” she said. “I’m back.”

A baby can change your whole life.

Next to Franklin and my Daddy, I don’t think I’ve ever loved any one person this much.

And I don’t know where I’ve gotten all this energy. It’s as if I’m on cruise control. While Franklin’s at work, I put Jeremiah in his stroller, bundle him up real good in his snowsuit Portia bought him, and we take long walks. I want to say to everyone I pass, “Isn’t he beautiful?” But I don’t. The only thing that brings me down is this neighborhood. There’s trash on the street, on the sidewalk, and I have to roll over it. I am certain of one thing: I’m not raising Jeremiah in New York. That much I do know. This is no place to grow up, I don’t care what Franklin says. A child should be able to go out in the backyard and play, or the front yard, for that matter. No one in Brooklyn has a front yard. I’ve already made a vow to him: By the time he’s three years old, we’re out of here. With or without his Daddy. Record contract or no record contract. Don’t ask me where I’d like to go. I haven’t taken this dream that far yet.

And am I dropping pounds by the day? Yes, yes, yes. I never did tell Franklin that Marie paid me back my eight hundred dollars; something told me to keep my mouth shut about it. So I took $163 of it and
joined this new health club right around the corner. Once I start work, on the way home this’ll be my first stop. I have no intention of staying fat. None whatsoever.

Today, though, I had to interview a baby-sitter. I’d already waited to the last minute. This morning, Jeremiah and I had walked over to the city’s day-care center, but they didn’t have any openings for his age group. A nice black woman, who ran the program, was very helpful. “When you got to go back to work, baby?” she asked me.

“In two weeks,” I said.

“Lord, don’t you hate the thought?”

But before I could answer, she just kept on talking. She had to be around forty, but well preserved, and as petite as she could be, with the exception of that behind of hers. Her name was Betty.

“You know what? My cousin Mary baby-sits, and she’s good with chil’ren. Got five daughters, honey.” She looked down at my application. “And she live right around the corner from you. She live the same as what I do. In the Gowanus projects. You want her number?”

She wrote it down on a piece of paper, and as soon as I got home, I phoned. Mary sounded very nice and said she could come right over to meet us. She was there in less than twenty minutes. She was quite attractive, taller than I was, about five foot nine, and a little heavyset; she had long, crinkly hair. The first thing she did was pick up Jeremiah and smile at him. He smiled back at her. “What a handsome little guy. How old you say he is?”

“Three and a half months.”

“My goodness. He’s a little bruiser, ain’t he? Is he on formula?”

“Yes.”

“Baby food?”

“Cereal and fruit.”

“That’s good.” She sat down on the couch and looked around. “You sure got a nice place here.”

“Thank you.” Jeremiah was jumping on her lap, and she was holding him right. I felt good about her. Very good. “So do you charge very much?”

“Whatever you can afford is fine. I just had a little boy what leave me after four years. Broke my heart, and all my girls is in school, and I could use some company. Whatever you wanna pay me is fine.”

I couldn’t believe this. Betty had told me fifty dollars a week would be plenty. When I offered it to Mary, she said that was just fine.

“Would you like to see my apartment first?” she asked.

As neat and clean as she was dressed, I assumed her house was the same way. Her fingernails were clean, and I didn’t want to insult her just because she lived in the projects, so I said, “Maybe we’ll stop by in a day or so to meet the rest of the family,” which is what we did. And I was right. Her husband was just as friendly; they’d been married for twenty-one years, and all their daughters—who almost fought over which of them was going to hold and play with Jeremiah—were just as good-natured as their parents.

Franklin was hopping around the house in his cast when we got back. He’d been getting around pretty good, and had left before we had this morning to check on getting his workman’s compensation. He was going to have to wear this cast for six weeks.

“I found a wonderful baby-sitter,” I said.

“That’s good. How much?”

“Fifty a week.”

“Damn. That’s two hundred a month, ain’t it?”

“She’s cheap, Franklin. Most day cares cost more than that.”

Then he turned to Jeremiah. “Come here, you little crumb-snatcher.”

Nothing made me happier than to see him playing with his son.

*   *   *

My first morning going back to work was weird. I was up at the crack of dawn, getting all Jeremiah’s stuff packed in the diaper bag. I must’ve packed at least fifteen Pampers, six bottles of formula, baby wipes, rattles, two bottles of juice, three or four changes of clothes in case he spit up too badly—too much of everything. I was out the door by seven, and the poor thing was still asleep when I put on his snowsuit. Then I wrapped I don’t know how many blankets around him. You could hardly see him as I pushed him in the stroller.

“My goodness, Zora, where is the baby?” Mary asked, then started laughing.

“Do I have too much on him, you think?”

“Chile, babies don’t get no colder than we do. Don’t worry about it, though. I can see you new at this.”

“You’re right. But, Mary, would you promise me one thing?”

“What’s that?”

“That you take him for a little walk every day, or at least get some fresh air?”

“Chile, whenever the weather is good, we sit out on the bench all day. I can’t stand being all cooped up here myself. Now you go on and have a good day.”

By the time I got on the subway, I had this overwhelming feeling of emptiness and guilt, like I’d just abandoned my baby. I’d only known him less than four months, and I had already handed him over to somebody else. I looked around the train at all the other women and wondered how many of them had left their babies like I’d just done. How many of them had felt like this? Was I just being silly? And I wondered even more, as I looked at them reading their romance novels or
New York Times
, whether they
were going to work because they wanted to or because they had to. I started crying and couldn’t stop. I wished there was a way I could’ve stayed home with him for his first year—just to get to know him, watch him take his first step. I just prayed that I wouldn’t miss out on that.

*   *   *

School was the same. Everyone was glad to see me.

“Miss Banks, we heard you had a baby boy. Is he as good-looking as you are?” someone said. I couldn’t catch the voice, but I thought it might have been Luke, who the kids swore had a crush on me.

“Can he sing as good as you?” Maria asked.

I just laughed.

“What’s it like being married?” Corinthia asked, leaning forward on her elbows.

I wanted to say, “I wish I knew,” but instead I said, “It’s great. Just great.”

The day was uneventful. I wanted to call Mary on my lunch hour to ask if everything was going well, but I didn’t want to get fanatic about this. After my last class, I had so much paperwork to attend to I couldn’t get away until almost four-thirty. Normally, I’d be out of here by three forty-five. I couldn’t wait to get to Mary’s, and when I did, Jeremiah was sitting on one of her daughters’ lap. She was ten.

“Hi, Miss Zora.”

“Hi.”

“Everything went just fine, Zora,” Mary said. “He’s such a good baby. The only time he cry is when he wet or hungry, huh?”

“I think so.”

I started packing him up, and then Mary said, “Why don’t you leave them bottles in the ’frigerator. You got enough to last a couple days, don’t you thank?” She started laughing. “Y’all new mothers kill me. And you know what: If you wanna bring a box of Pampers
and just leave ’em here, and a few clothes, it’ll save you from lugging all that stuff in the morning.”

I told her that was a very good idea, and it’s what I did from then on.

*   *   *

Franklin hadn’t heard a word about his workman’s compensation, but he was getting around real well. And he had gained a few more pounds doing nothing but lying around the house all day. So this is what I asked him: “Would you mind picking Jeremiah up in the afternoons, since I take him over to the baby-sitter’s? That’s fair, don’t you think?”

“Yeah; and no, I don’t mind.”

“Have you been doing any woodworking during the day?”

“I ain’t got no wood and ain’t got no money to buy none. I wanted to make us a dynamite wall unit to put all the books in, and a new bed frame—one that I can fit in—but it cost money.”

“How much?”

“Well, I wanna put Formica on it. You know I don’t make no bullshit, baby. I’m talking about real pieces of furniture—works of art. Something you’ll be proud of. A couple of hundred; but a hundred would get me started.”

I went in my purse and got it, since I had just got paid. And I don’t know where my mind was, because the rent was almost due, and since he didn’t have an income, I was going to have to pay all of it. Again. I was just getting sick of coming home seeing him planted in front of the TV.

“Thank you, baby. This is gon’ be beautiful, I swear it is.”

*   *   *

When I walked in from work the next day, Franklin was hard at work. “Where’s Jeremiah?” I asked.

“Aw, shit, I knew it was something else I was supposed to do, baby. I’ll go get him right now.”

He forgot?

“Never mind,” I said. “Never mind.”

“I’ll get him tomorrow. I promise. I was just so into this I got lost, baby. I gotta change my measurements again. I’m sorry.”

The next day he didn’t forget, but Jeremiah had pooped and Franklin acted like he didn’t know how to change him and had left him on the bed, lying in it. I didn’t say anything.

I had to go to the laundromat, so I packed up the grocery cart and put Jeremiah on top in his baby seat. Franklin carried it downstairs for me. I washed five loads of clothes, and came home and cooked dinner.

By June, this routine was getting to be a little too much. When I asked Franklin why he couldn’t watch Jeremiah or take him to the baby-sitter and pick him up, since he was home all day, he said, “I could get a phone call at any time of day about work, and what am I supposed to say—‘I can’t come ’cause I’m baby-sitting’?”

I never had time to go to the health club, and when I did, I was too damn tired. I’d been looking forward to having the summer off, but when I found out that Franklin wasn’t getting any workman’s compensation, because it turned out he’d been drinking on the job and it was all his fault—he had neglected to tell me that part—I had no choice but to sign up to teach summer school. We needed the money. Though his cast was now off, he was so into the bookcase—which was turning out to be even prettier than I expected—he asked if I could just bear with him a few more weeks, until he finished the bed.

Like a fool, I said yes.

A few more weeks lasted until September. And that’s when I realized something. He didn’t want to go back to work. Which I sort of understood. And granted, he was making himself useful around the house, but damn. This just felt so lopsided. I still loved
the man, no doubt about that, but we were standing too still. I wanted him to do something. I wanted to be proud of him again. I wanted him to give me more reasons to look forward to spending the rest of my life with him. When we first met, Franklin excited me, kept me worked up. I never knew what to expect from him, and now I do. I guess the thing that hurts the most is knowing he has all this talent but isn’t doing anything with it, except building furniture for us.

I mean, I’ve been hanging in there with him. I know I’ve gotten on his nerves, but he’s gotten on mine too. I’ve often wondered, if I’d been off work the way he has, would he be as understanding. All I did know right now was that I’d been paying rent—everything, really—since March, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Franklin, we need to talk,” I said to him one Saturday morning after I’d asked him to watch Jeremiah while I went to the laundromat, and he said he couldn’t. “Why?” I’d asked. “’Cause I’m gon’ be using the power saw and drill, and I can’t hear him when he cry and I don’t want all this sawdust flying in his face. Take him with you…. Talk about what?”