Love in a Carry-On Bag (14 page)

P
ART 2

I used to want the words “she tried” on my tombstone, now I want “she did it.”

Katherine Dunham

To be a great musician, you’ve got to be open to what’s new, what’s happening at the moment. You have to be able to absorb it if you’re going to continue to grow and communicate.

Miles Davis

Chapter Twenty-Six

Monroe Street

E
rica could remember the
day her father walked out on them. Jazmine had stayed home from school that morning with a sore throat, so she dawdled in both directions alone. It was a brisk autumn afternoon, and tri-colored leaves covered the lawns of her neighbors as she sauntered from her after-school stop at the library. Even though it wasn’t late, the sky was getting dark; the Sunday before Erica had turned back their clocks to observe Daylight Savings Time. It had been her job to adjust all of the timepieces, but the one in the kitchen was too high, and she had to wait for her father to take it down. Ms. Hauptmann was her teacher, and she was just settling into fifth grade hoping that the pimples rising on her cheeks were just a passing phase. She had a crush on Javier, a Puerto Rican in the sixth grade, and she was fantasizing about what it would feel like to kiss him when she slipped the key from around her neck and unlocked the front door.

The soap opera
Guiding Light
was on, and Reva and Philip Spaulding were laughing about shaking up a blue blooded party. But their glee didn’t have any effect on her mother, who was sitting limp on the peach floral couch. She was still wearing her nightgown, the sheer blue one that she wouldn’t part with even though the hem had come loose against her left knee. Her eyelids were puffy and her hair was soggy against her forehead. Her shoulders sagged away from the sofa.

“What’s the matter with you?” Erica kicked off her oxford shoes and tightened the band around her bushy ponytail.

“Nothin’,” her mother uttered, but her hand shook as she stretched the remote and turned down the volume. “How was your day?”

“What’s wrong?” Erica could feel a heaviness pressing down on them like thick smoke.

“There ain’t no easy way to tell you this. I already told Jazmine.” Her mother kept her eyes trained on the hardwood floor.

“Tell me what?”

“Your daddy’s moving out.”

“Huh?” The six Now and Laters Erica had sucked down on the way home felt like gallstones in her belly. “What’re you talking about?”

“Leavin’,” her mother’s voice broke and fresh tears fell. “I ’on’t know where. He’ll be here in a little bit to get his things.”

“So you have to make him stay.” Erica clenched her fist.

“Girl, I can’t make that man do nothing that he ’on’t want to do. You might as well go start your homework. Ya sister’s upstairs lying down.”

The first floor of their home was railroad style, so Erica had to pass through the dining room to get to the breakfast area where she did her work. As she unzipped her book bag she heard her mother moving the seat cushions of the loveseat. Then she heard the cap twist. The tilt and sip to her mother’s lips was silent but Erica knew she was drinking, and resentment burned through her chest like a smashed bottle of hot pepper sauce.

It was her mother’s fault that her father was leaving. If only she would act right, stop running the streets with Bonnie, get a job, try harder so he wouldn’t get so angry. Erica tugged on her
ponytail and wondered how they would survive without him?

She idolized her father and wanted to be just like him. Whenever she asked him a question he knew the answer, never needing to go to a dictionary to look up the spelling or meaning of a word. It was him who sparked Erica’s longtime affair with reading. Once a month, he took her to the black-owned bookstore on Broad Street in Newark, picking out books on slavery and black historical figures.

“Don’t ever stop learning,” he would say while explaining the material to her at a level that she understood.

Every Saturday she worked with him in the garage tallying up receipts, mopping oil and sorting auto parts. Over turkey sandwiches stuffed with sour cream potato chips, they discussed poetry by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Sonia Sanchez. Jazz was always playing in the shop and her father would stop her in mid-sentence, asking, “What instrument do you hear?”

“Trumpet?”

“Close, alto sax, baby,” he’d tease, ruffling her hair. Their relationship was easy and free. They were thick as peanut butter, two halves of the same whole. Erica was his main girl. So this business of him leaving had to be a lie and Erica decided to pretend like her mother hadn’t said anything at all.

At the table, she turned her attention to the fraction worksheet that Ms. Hauptmann assigned. But after two problems, the equations bled into each other. She couldn’t concentrate because her stomach hurt and her ears were cocked for the sound of her dad’s tires rolling into the driveway. Every noise made her jump: a basketball bouncing, teenagers talking mess, horns honking, neighbors calling their dogs in from the yard. Her nerves were muddled and tangled and she knew the only thing that would calm her was a word search puzzle. So she pulled her book from her
bag and started seeking words associated with the desert.

Three puzzles later, his key turned in the door and Erica was out of her seat, running to greet him.

“Daddy,” she shouted, throwing her arms around his waist. She was growing like corn stalk and her head reached the top of his chest. As he kissed her forehead she could smell spearmint on his breath. When he pulled away his manila-colored face looked oily and long. His posture, which was usually so erect and poised, was droopy and unsure. Something was indeed wrong.

“Did your mother tell you?” The tweed cap he wore was so low Erica could barely see his brown eyes, and his navy work jacket had a bleach stain on the elbow patch, because her mother was terrible at laundry.

“Tell me what?” she feigned innocence.

“I told her, but she need to hear it from you,” her mother’s voice invaded their privacy, and Erica cut her eyes up at the ceiling wishing her mother would just disappear.

“You can’t do nothing right,” he grumbled on his way upstairs with Erica on his heels like a loyal puppy. She followed him down the long hallway to the back bedroom that used to be her parents’ but was now just her father’s because her mother slept with her. The tattered suitcase that she and Jazmine took to Grandma Queeny’s house on weekends sat at the foot of the bed, and the old zipper stretched and groaned under the weight of his wardrobe.

“Where are you going, Daddy?” Erica asked when he reached under the bed for his second pair of work boots. Even with the evidence in front of her she still refused to believe.

“I’m moving into the apartment on top of the garage.”

“But why, Daddy?”

He sat heavily on the edge of the bed and removed his cap. A misty sheen had gathered in his eyes. “Things haven’t been right
between your mother and me in a long time.”

“So, she can keep sleeping with me. I won’t complain. Just don’t go,” she whined and he opened his arms to her. Erica fell against her father and clung to him so tight it was hard for her to breathe. They rocked for what felt like forever and all of the fear that had been rising since she walked in from school poured out.

“Ta... take me with you.”

“I can’t, E-bird. Girls need their mother,” he squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll still come get you on Saturdays to work at the garage. Nothing will change.” He rose to his feet and picked up the heavy bag.

“But it will.”

Erica pleaded with him down the long hallway and on the stairs. By the time he set the suitcase down in the living room, she was beside herself, and had thrown her skinny frame and blocked the entrance to the vestibule door.

“Come on baby, I’ll be back soon,” her father promised, but his words held no value and when Erica moved from the door she threw herself on him again. The commotion must have woken up Jazmine because she ran down the steps. When she saw what was going on she joined Erica’s tantrum. Both girls carried on with fever. Jazmine was on the floor holding his legs, and without thinking Erica kicked the suitcase over and stomped it with her foot.

“Enough,” her mother intervened. “Girls, you can’t cage a man who wanna be free.”

“What are you talking about, Gweny? You ain’t got no cause to speak. This is on you,” he pointed his finger.

“You’re the one leavin’,” she replied, and her sad eyes hung heavy and the room fell quiet.

Erica was thinking about the Jets season, which had already begun. How could she watch a football game without her father?
Right before Thanksgiving, they would turn their attention to basketball. They didn’t have a favorite team, so they rooted for coaches and players. That year, they were going for the 76ers.

“What about the game? You promised to take me to Philadelphia,” Erica screeched.

Her father rubbed her back and then wrapped his callused hands around the suitcase for the final time.

The air was humid and stuffy when he kissed her cheek goodbye, the tears so blinding and hot, she didn’t even feel his lips. Watching him through the white screen door, Erica held Jazmine’s hand while tattooing a picture of her father on her heart. She strained her ears for some type of music, something to remember him by as the engine of his Chevy Impala turned over. But there was none. The car pulled away from her life as silent as a hearse heading for a funeral. Erica was left unprotected, and fully in charge for the first time. She was 10 years old.

After her father’s departure,
Erica’s mother didn’t leave the house for days. She sat crossed legged in her queen-sized bed, in that same blue nightgown, chain-smoking menthol cigarettes, her dingy bedroom covered in a constant film of smoke. She was drunk all the time. It took Erica a week before she found all the secret locations where her mother kept her stash: in the wedges of the sofa, between the top mattress and box spring, behind a picture frame on the mantel, on the bookshelf covered by a book, or under music sheets in the piano stool. On the tenth day, when the gown was soiled and her mother had begun to smell like spoiled squash, eight-year-old Jazmine ran the bath until it was brimming with soapy water, and Erica summoned up her strongest voice.

“Ma, go get in the tub.”

Their mother mumbled something incoherent, so Erica and
Jazmine flipped back the crusty comforter and pulled her from the bed. Between her pillow and the wooden bed frame was another bottle, and while Jazmine watched over her mother in the tub, Erica went to the kitchen and poured what was left of it down the drain. After washing and braiding her mother’s hair, Erica changed the linen, aired out the room, and then fixed egg sandwiches and fried bologna for dinner. They ate on T.V. trays in front of the set.

As the weeks drifted on, her mother slept later and later. It became Erica’s job to wake and dress her sister for school. Most days when the girls returned home, their mother was either in the bed where they had left her or gone. If she was out, there was no telling when she’d return, because she never left notes and they didn’t have a telephone. It could be an hour or days, and that scared Erica just as much as the mice hiding in the dark crevices of their home.

Her mother owed everybody money. Since the telephone was disconnected, men often came banging on their front door, unannounced to collect her debt. When this happened Erica and Jazmine ran what they called “code badman,” a system they devised to keep the visitors from knowing that they were home alone. Whenever the bell rang, the girls would creep into the basement and see who it was through a small floor window. They wouldn’t dare move until it was clear that the person was gone. It was always a man looking for her mother, and once Erica heard a guy threatening her through the mail slot, calling her a bitch and shouting that if she didn’t have his money when he came next week, “I’m a slice that pretty little face.”

Petrified, Erica disconnected the doorbell, and later threw up in her sleep. Nights alone were unnerving. Jazmine would sleep in Erica’s bed, with the television playing all night long. Most times their stomachs were empty.

As an adult searching
for forgiveness, Erica came to the conclusion that her mother couldn’t help who she was. Gweny had come from a long line of poor women, who raised their children as single parents, and chased away the Section 8 blues with twenty-four-ounce cans of malt liquor, Newport cigarettes and prescription pills. None of the women in her mother’s family worked. Instead they found clever ways to live off of the government. They soothed themselves with soap operas, artery-clogging foods, street drugs and number-running, while passing their dysfunctional baton down to their daughters, much like wealthy families willed trust funds. At an early age, Erica decided she wouldn’t continue the legacy, and her father’s mother, Grandma Queeny, was the person who co-signed that determination.

Grandma Queeny could have easily turned her back on the girls when her son left. But she picked them up every weekend, making sure they had dance lessons, God, and home-cooked meals. Once a month, she took the girls to the Newark Museum for culture, and taught them how to make a way, “even when you feel like you’re surrounded by dead end streets.” She died when Erica was a senior in high school, bequeathing the girls her house and money for college. Erica was left in charge again.

“Peanuts or pretzels?” the airline attendant broke into Erica’s thoughts. She was on her flight back from Los Angeles and accepted the pretzels, hoping that it was something she could keep in her stomach. Everything she tried to eat over the past five days just sat stubbornly on her belly, and she had run out of Rolaids. The trip to Los Angeles had been a disaster, certainly not worth the fiasco with Warren. His words, “I can’t do this anymore” and “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” permeated her every turn.

Warren was what she needed, why couldn’t he see that? She was so sorry. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt him. Things had gotten out of hand, and perhaps she had taken him for granted, but she never wanted this. Warren was her sun, soil, hydration and vegetation. Her body was retaliating by refusing to operate without him. Not being able to hold her food down was only half of it. She wasn’t sleeping and the back of her neck was stiff. Five days was the longest they had ever spent without talking, and the mental distance was nauseating. She missed his voice, wanted him to comfort her and tell her things would be all right. While in Los Angeles she had worked up the nerve to call him from her hotel room, but when he didn’t pick up she couldn’t explain her hopelessness to his answering machine, and killed the line.