The Warmest December (23 page)

Like a film, my teenage years and early twenties appeared before me. Those years were lived in a blur of drugs and alcohol. I tried everything and anything: uppers, downers, blue lights, black beauties, mescaline, reefer, cocaine, dope. I tried it all, but in the end I always came back to the bottle.

I drank to numb myself against Hy-Lo. I drank to numb myself against the voices of my professors. I drank to get my head straight before going to work. I drank to wind down before coming home.

What was it my boss said, “You are sick, Kenzie, you need help”? I think those were her words.

My head was in the guacamole at the time and the client, Mr. Mayamoto, and his sales team were clicking away with their sleek silver cameras. I don’t know if I actually heard her correctly over the noise of the digital flashes.

“You’re fired!” she screamed when I asked if I could just have one more drink. Just one for the road. Then I turned and puked on her Italian leather pumps.

Their loss, I thought to myself as I stumbled home. Shoot, I was the best account executive they had, at least that’s what the vodka and orange juice told me every morning before I went to work.

Then there was Mr. Thierry, with his thin red nose and crooked toupee. He shook my hand, indicated for me to take a seat, and then said, “Kenzie, tell me a little bit about yourself.” And I did, I rambled on and on about my experience and why I would be the best candidate for the position, and then I noticed that Mr. Thierry had his face screwed up so tight that his top lip covered the openings to his nose.

I tried to ignore the look on his face, I kept on talking and concentrated on how good I looked. I had on my finest, sharpest suit. The one that showed just enough thigh to be considered aggressive but not sluttish.

But then he opened his mouth and I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “You smell like a distillery,” he said to me ten minutes after I walked into his office.

“What?” I replied, smiling and leaning forward, showing just enough cleavage to be considered powerful but not easy.

“Ms. Lowe, have you been drinking?” He snatched a quick look at the cleavage I presented him and his face went beet red. He rolled his chair backward. “Have you?” he said and then screwed his face up again.

“Drinking?” I played stupid. “Like coffee and tea?”

Mr. Thierry’s face kind of undid itself and I would have expected his features to soften, but they didn’t, they just looked undone and irritated.

“Do you really think I could consider you for this position?” And then he laughed. “You, a drunk?”

I laughed too, laughed until my sides hurt and security came and removed me from the building.

Then there was that thing William would always accuse me of—what was it? Oh, yeah: “The only time you want to have sex with me, Kenzie, is when you’re half-drunk, and then you can’t even participate in it.”

That’s when sex was at its best for me. I needed to have a few drinks in me; without it I was as passionless as a log. I never really wanted sex unless I was drinking; it was as if the liquor reminded me that I was a woman.

“Funny how you never make that comment before the sex,” I would mumble and roll away from him.

“Why don’t you ever let me hold you?” he’d ask. I could feel his eyes looking down on me and I knew he was trying so much to love me, but found himself hating me more and more each day.

“Because I needed to be fucked, not held,” I would say and I knew, even in a semidrunken haze, that those words belonged to Hy-Lo. I couldn’t remember the exact age I was when I first heard him utter those same words to Delia, but I remember thinking that the sound of it reminded me of smoke and ashes.

That was it for William, he’d had enough of me. The numerous one-night stands he’d heard about, the public drunken outbursts. “Get out, Kenzie,” he said late one night in a low even voice. I could still see him, propped up against his pillow, one hand searching the nightstand for his fashionable tortoise shell–rimmed glasses, while the other hand wiped at the tears in his eyes.

William had put up with me for a long time, nearly a year. They need to make a trophy for a guy who still kisses you full on your lips after you’ve had your head in a public toilet.

A national award should be instituted for the man who brings his girlfriend home to meet his mother and doesn’t even blink in embarrassment that the woman drinks his dad and two older brothers under the table before passing out in the lounge chair in the backyard.

Why isn’t there a certificate of recognition for a man who loves a woman who can only love him after she’s had a bottle of wine and two after-dinner cordials?

I tried to love William, but my efforts were as fleeting as the seasons and paled and withered as quick as fall leaves.

“Drop dead,” I said to him and slammed out of his apartment with nothing but a gallon of vodka in one hand and my pocketbook in the other. Butt naked, I stood on the corner of 90th Street and Columbus Avenue at four in the morning, trying to hail a cab.

That’s how I ended up in the G building with four doctors peering into my eyes, ears, and nose with penlights, pushing white cards with funny-shaped ink blotches in my face, asking me about my childhood, my mother, and if I’d ever thought about killing myself or anyone else.

I was sober by then; the cold steel stool against my exposed behind, the large bright lights, and the crisp white walls of the room had shocked me back into sobriety.

“Do you know how you got here … miss?” one doctor questioned and folded his arms across his chest.

I wasn’t sure. I sort of recalled a policeman approaching me; he was bent forward a bit and he took large steps like he was trying to avoid stepping on a crack in the sidewalk. His arms were stretched far ahead of him and his hands moved slowly up and down as if he were bouncing two basketballs in slow motion. His mouth was moving but all I could hear was my own voice screaming, “Taxi!”

The next thing I knew I was worried about getting frostbite on my ass.

I spent ten days there. They would have let me go after three, but I started talking to the air around my bed and smiling at the thick black bars of the windows, and my doctors thought better of it.

Glenna brought me tulips; who knew where she’d found them so late in November. She told me that the washed-out gray of my hospital gown did nothing for my complexion and made my butt look big. It was supposed to be a joke, but neither one of us laughed.

We sat across from each other, our eyes moving over each other’s faces, taking in as much as possible, storing it away just in case it was the last time. Just in case. Glenna had stuck with me through everything—the times I yelled at her for taking me home before last call. Through each lost job and boyfriend. She never gave up on me. Our fingers linked at some point during her visit and we cried.

We held each other for a long time when she got up to go. The other visitors, patients, and staff probably thought we were lovers. I could hear the snickering at my back, and I pulled Glenna closer to me. I wanted to tell them, those people who laughed and pointed, that we were the best of friends and loved far beyond the physical plane.

When Delia came to see me, her eyes were red and her shoulders slumped as if she were coming to visit a criminal instead of her sick daughter. I smiled when the orderly led her into the visiting room.

We didn’t say much, just shared a cigarette and watched the other patients visit with family and friends. I hugged her when she got up to leave and I told her that I was staying because I needed the rest.

Delia surveyed the room and then came back to me, and for a second I thought I saw envy flash there. “Uh-huh,” she said and moved her hand across her forehead.

* * *

Bottle in hand, I moved to the door of the apartment; my hand shook as I grabbed the doorknob. “God, please,” I begged as I took the first step out into the hallway. I could feel the cold wrap around my arms and hear the wind as it slipped in through the open windows of the corridors. “Please, please, please,” I prayed as I moved down the hall, closing my eyes against the black and white block pattern of the floor. Those blocks bucked and writhed beneath my feet like an angry ocean and I had to stop every so often and press my back against the wall for balance.

I moved on until my fingers wrapped around the wooden handle that would open up the heavy iron door of the incinerator.

“Please, please,” I begged as I dangled the bottle between my hell and the fiery one below. The wind mocked me and called me weak while it whipped through the hall above me and started down the stairs. I moaned because it hurt somewhere inside of me in a place so deep I couldn’t reach it, and then the wind laughed and slammed my apartment door back hard on its hinges.

I thought once more about taking a sip before turning the bottle loose, thought about the feel of the glass mouth against my own before the liquid streamed out, but then I heard music come in off the street and for some reason I remembered the pain that was dying in a hospital bed across town.

My fingers uncurled and let the clear glass bottle slip free and down into the flaming blackness.

After that I thought I would need air so I took a walk, but found myself back beside him again, closer now. My chair centered with his knees. Some type of understanding shadowing my hate.

I believed I’d won a battle that day; the war was still raging, but I was making progress.

“You never won the battle, Hy-Lo, did you?” I asked in a whisper while my fingers fiddled with the hem of the sheet that hung off the bed. “You gave in to the laughter of the wind, didn’t you?” I asked his sleeping face.

His foot flinched a little and I knew his answer was yes.

“Hello,” Nurse Green chimed as she poked her head around the curtain. “How are we doing today?” she asked, her face glowing, her white starched uniform still whiter beneath the sunrays spilling in through the windows.

“Fine,” I answered and for the first time held her face with my eyes.

The act must have thrown her off a bit because her eyes widened and she stammered her next word. “G-good,” she said and her smile broadened. She stood there for a moment, smiling and looking from me to Hy-Lo and then back to me as if she was waiting for something else.

“Good,” she said once again, patted my shoulder, and left.

When I returned home I sat alone on the couch for hours staring at the Christmas tree with its thin branches and empty spaces. Someone fired a gun off in the distance and somewhere in the building a dog howled long and sad.

I wiped at my eyes and expected my hands to come away moist and salty, but my eyes were dry. I moved to the window to stare out into the blue-blackness of the night. There were a few people moving up and down the sidewalk, stepping over the garbage that swirled and spun in the wake of the wind pushing at their backs and messing with their hair.

They moved around the garbage that stood on the corners— those two-legged pieces of trash that pushed dirty hands into their faces and begged for spare change.

Hy-Lo had become that type of rubbish, the type that lived and breathed and asked for change from good and decent people. “Can you spare a quarter?” “Got a nickel for me, brother?” “Spare a dime?”

He was jobless and would have been homeless if it weren’t for me. He had lost much of his mind with Malcolm. Then he lost his house, whatever spirit he had, and his dignity followed soon after; that’s how he ended up on the street begging for change.

I would feed and house him best I could because I hated the look I saw in Delia’s eyes whenever I put the dead bolt on the door. “Your father is still out there,” she would say to me and her eyebrows would come together.

Yes, I fed and housed him best I could, but I would not buy his liquor, so he turned to the street and the kindness of strangers.

He wasn’t the only one, there were a few of them— gray-skinned men with dirty jeans that bagged at the knees. Their eyes were bloodshot or jaundice-colored and their faces gruff with a five o’clock shadow present at any hour of the day. These men, including Hy-Lo, smiled most of the time, and the times they didn’t, they sang. But they could all be found in front of the liquor store or at one of the two corners the liquor store sat between.

“Youuuuuu send me. I know youuuuuu send me.”
That was Hy-Lo’s favorite song.
“Darling, you do, darling, you do,”
he would bellow out off-key and do a little James Brown kick-andturn after each chorus. He would almost always lose his balance and end up falling into a pedestrian, who would either shake their head in disgust and move on or cuss him and then give him a violent shove for good measure.

He would stumble backward and put his hands up in apology and ask, “Got a dime?” and then laugh like an old man, even though he was only forty-eight.

Alcohol pulls your youth from you in layers. I know for a fact that it does because at thirty-four I have counted more than 145 silver strands that have sprouted up in my head like gray weeds and I have to dab concealer on the puffy skin beneath my eyes. Sometimes my body shakes for no reason, and then there is the forgetfulness.

When I look in the bathroom mirror at myself I realize that I look the way Hy-Lo did all of his life. And sometimes I see my reflection in the glass of the window and see Delia’s face in mine, the way she looked those years she tried to drink away the pain.

Chapter Fifteen

W
hen I graduated from high school I came back to our small apartment and found that the rooms were bare except for the brown boxes that were stacked one on top of the other.

“Surprise!” Delia exclaimed when she saw the expression on my face. “We bought a house!”

I’d never seen her happier. In fact I’d never seen her happy.

The house Hy-Lo purchased with his VA loan and the money he had saved over the years was a small one-family structure on Autumn Avenue, a tree-lined street way on the other side of Brooklyn in a neighborhood that bordered the borough of Queens. It was a sixty-year-old, two-story white brick with old pipes and solid walls. The house had three bedrooms and a basement that would always reek of dog and mildew.