What They Found (13 page)

“I told him I’d let him know,” Abeni said. “So I have to call him and tell him something.”

“No, you don’t! I guarantee he will call you and come up with some brand-new pitiful story,” Maxine said. “He’s supposed to be your man and you’re the only one that can’t see his game.”

Abeni heard herself promising Maxine that she wouldn’t
call Harrison, but in her heart she still wasn’t sure. After all, Harrison was her boyfriend, not Maxine’s. He might not have been perfect, but she felt she owed him something just for caring for her.

The phone rang again and Abeni thought it would probably be Maxine with some more advice. She looked at the phone display and saw that it was Harrison.

She was kind of thinking that if she and Harrison just cooled it for about six months maybe they would just drift apart and she wouldn’t have to go through the drama of the split-up.

“Abeni, you in there?” Noee called.

“I got the phone, Noee,” Abeni said. “Hello, Harrison.” She tried to keep her voice impersonal.

“I need you to do it again.” Harrison was talking fast again, his voice edged with excitement.

“Do what again?”

“Look, honey, breaking up with you was one of the biggest, most gripping moments of my life. I could feel myself going through changes. What I realized when I got home was that for the first time I had to reencounter my entire existence.”

“And?”

“And what I knew I had to do was to relive that moment and put it on tape,” Harrison said. “You know it’s not usual when a person looks into the mirror of a moment and sees—I mean really sees—who he is.”

“So what are you saying you want to do?”

“I want you to go through the whole thing again,” Harrison said. “I know it was emotional for you, but that’s all right. Life is really about emotions dressed up like ordinary activities. We think we’re working, or riding the bus, but we’re really in transit from one emotion to the next.”

“So you want me to break up with you again?”

“I even spoke to Debbie up at Pam-Pam’s and she said it would be okay if we didn’t take longer than fifteen or twenty minutes to get it done.”

“Whoa, wait a minute—”

“It means that much to me, Abeni,” Harrison said. “Not as much as you mean to me, but this might change my life forever.”

Abeni knew she should have said no, should have told Harrison that she didn’t want any part of it, but she didn’t. What had her friend Terry said? “That man must be loving your brains out.” No, he wasn’t, but they had been going together for enough years for some people to think they were already married. And it was true, Harrison could just about talk her into anything. She didn’t have to call Maxine to know what their conversation was going to be like. But she did.

“Girl, he’s trying to game you! He’s been practicing some of his sweet talk and now he’s going to get you back up into Pam-Pam’s and run it up and down the aisle
and he’s going to have you backing up so fast you won’t know what hit you. This is just one sorry-butt Negro who has got his own preservation society and that is you. And puh-leeze don’t tell me that you owe him something because you’re the only one giving anything.”

If she hadn’t told Harrison that she would be at Pam-Pam’s at two-thirty and hadn’t known that he had arranged for Debbie to give them twenty minutes, Abeni might have still backed out. She understood Maxine’s point of view and had written down what she was going to say to Harrison, and told herself that no matter what he said, she wouldn’t back down.

“Harrison, I have a serious problem with you,” Abeni said, trying to ignore the video camera that Harrison’s friend was holding and the lights arranged around the back booth in Pam-Pam’s. “I just don’t believe we can make it anymore.”

“You don’t believe …” there was a catch in Harrison’s voice as he spoke. “Abeni, I thought you would always believe in my dreams. I thought you would always be there for me.”

“I did, too,” Abeni said. “But I just can’t anymore.”

“Baby, look, we—you and me, Harrison and Abeni— have meant so much to each other over the years. Knowing that—what we’ve meant to each other and how much I’ve loved you—what are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to say—” Abeni felt terrible inside, and
ashamed, and embarrassed, but she was determined. “I’m trying to say we’re through.”

“You can’t be serious.” Harrison took her hands in his. “You can’t look me in the eyes and say—”

“We’re through!” Abeni said, looking Harrison Boyd directly in the eyes.

“Oh, no!” Harrison’s head snapped forward into his outstretched hands.

A woman across the aisle gasped and spilled her coffee. A teenager took a quick step backward as he saw Harrison’s entire body start to shake. The sobs were heartrending. When the big man looked up, his face was already streaked with tears.

“Please … baby …” Harrison’s lips moved but no other sound came out. Then he put his head down on the table again and seemed to twist in agony as his body slumped to the ground.

Abeni’s eyes opened wide as she watched Harrison, bent nearly double, sobbing on the patterned tile floor. After a long moment he looked up and lifted a trembling hand toward her. Again the lips moved but no sound came out.

“He’s trying to beg her,” a slight brown-skinned man shook his head sadly. “But the words just ain’t coming!”

When Abeni got over the shock she could feel her anger rising. Harrison didn’t say anything about all of this performance. She didn’t know where else Harrison
was going with it but she had some suggestions in mind as she stood up.

“Yo, girl, give him a chance,” a young voice called out.

On the floor Harrison was still on his knees, still looking up at her, now with both hands open and pleading.

Abeni slid out of the booth, turned on her heel, and pushed her way through the crowd. There were some boos and catcalls and at least one woman called her a nasty name.

She barely managed to avoid a gypsy cab as she crossed Malcolm X Boulevard. She was all the way up to 138th Street before she noticed she didn’t have her cell.

Back at the shop, she told Noee, “By the time I got here, I didn’t need a cell, I could send out any message I had using hate waves!”

“I don’t see why you went down there in the first place.”

“I’ve been going with the man for umpteen years and he asked me for a simple favor,” Abeni said. “I didn’t expect him to do something stupid like screaming and hollering all over the floor in public and embarrassing me to death. People looking at me like I’m some kind of cold-hearted freak or something. They actually
booed
me like I was a baseball team or something! I wish I had taken off my shoe and beat him in his big head.”

“What you crying for now?” Noee asked. “It’s over, right?”

“You can say that again.”

“So move on, big sister,” Noee said. “Move on.”

Which is exactly what Abeni Evans did for the next four months. She moved on with her work at the Curl-E-Que by taking a course in thread waxing, moved on in her personal life by starting a diary of her accomplishments, and moved her mind completely away from the entire classification known as sorry-butt Negroes.

Then Harrison called.

“Can you hear me? The traffic on Piccadilly is brutal this time of day.”

“Piccadilly? Where are you?”

“I rented a little place on Jermyn Street in London,” Harrison said. “Our film is being shown here and I got to tell you, it’s being well received here at the Brixton festival. Two studios are thinking of picking it up for national distribution.”

“What film?”

“My documentary on the war between the black man and the black woman,” Boyd said. “One review said that the episode in Pam-Pam’s was the strongest thing he’s seen in years. I’m just wondering if you want to come over for the closing ceremonies. You’re a star over here, baby. A stone star. Your picture is all over Leicester Square. I think I can get you some interviews with the BBC. What do you think?”

Abeni looked in the mirror to make sure she was awake. “Harrison Boyd, are you telling me I’m a star because I
broke up with a black man?” she asked. “No, I’m not coming.”

“Hey, you don’t mind if I’m recording this, do you?” Harrison asked. “Matter of fact, would you mind saying the whole thing over again? Abeni? Abeni? You there?”

L
ooking in the mirror, I saw what I always saw, plain old me. Short hair sticking out all over my head like it ain’t never seen a comb, lips too big, eyes puffy from being up all night. There ain’t nothing pretty about me. I’m sixteen, and I got a baby, but that doesn’t mean I’m some kind of freak. And I’ve never been a whore. Even though I’m up here all night wondering how I’m going to get something for Amiri. He’s old enough to be eating something more than cereal, but that’s all I had the money for. Money don’t come knocking on your door if you poor and black.

Amiri, he’s looking at me and don’t even know he needs some different food. He’s only nine months and is trusting in me and I ain’t got nothing for him. I ain’t
got a job. I ain’t got a daddy for him. And it don’t mean nothing to him if I’m decent inside. Hungry go up against decent and it come away still hungry. So I’m sitting in the window all night looking down at 145th Street, watching the cars go by over the wet streets and the neon lights in the windows down on the avenue. Amiri didn’t sleep much, either. Even when I was rocking him in my lap.

When it got light and the bodega was open I put Amiri back in his bed and got the seventy-three cents I had for more cereal. It wasn’t enough for milk, I knew. I was thinking I could walk down to 125th Street to that new coffee place. They were new and still kept the milk for the coffee on the counter, and I could get some of those little containers. I knew in a few weeks they would see people taking them and then move them behind the counter with the sugar. But it was a long way to walk and to leave Amiri.

I got downstairs just as the sun was coming up over the buildings. That’s when I seen Billy Carroll, John’s son. Billy’s about eighteen, maybe even nineteen, and classy like his father. He always treated me like people. I appreciate it when people treat me right even though I ain’t got nothing going on.

“Letha, what are you doing up so early?” Billy asked. He was sitting on the stoop with his sketch pad and some square crayons or something he was drawing with.
I looked at his pad and he was drawing the buildings. Billy could draw.

“Just going to the store,” I said. “What you doing up so early?”

“Wanted to get the sunrise coming over the buildings,” he said. “It’s close to the same effect as sunrise over the mountains, except the buildings have more red in them. When the sun hits them just right, they just about glow.”

I looked at his picture and then at the buildings. He got it down right. I told him I liked his picture.

“Thanks,” he said, smiling.

The rain had stopped but there were still puddles in the streets and water ran along the edge of the sidewalk toward the sewers. The neighborhood was waking up. People were coming out of their buildings going to work. A tall old man was bringing garbage cans out the side door of the supermarket. He turned them on an angle and kind of rolled them to the curb. The old black and white cat that hung around the secondhand shop was stretching itself in front of the rusty iron gates.

I went into the bodega and found the oatmeal. It was sixty-nine cents for a small box. Down near Broadway, under the el, you could get the same box for fifty-seven cents. It made me mad to have to pay twelve cents more for the cereal, but I was too tired to even think on it.

When I got back across the street Billy was still sitting on the stoop.

“Hey, Letha,” he said as I started up the stairs.

“Hey, Billy,” I said back.

“Letha, why don’t you let me paint you?” he said. “Are you busy this morning?”

“Paint me?” I looked at him.

“I’ll give you forty dollars,” he said. “I’ll come up to your place and do some sketches of you and take a few photos. It’ll only take a couple of hours at the most. And I really need a model. These buildings get to look all the same after a while. What do you say?”

I turned and looked down at him and he was looking dead in my face. A bunch of things went through my head at the same time. The first thing was that I felt bad Billy saying that to me. Talking about coming up to my place and paying me some forty dollars. For what? I wasn’t some pretty woman to be paying to have her picture painted. Was he thinking he was going to come up to my house and pay me forty dollars and do whatever he wanted to do?

It made me mad to think he was hustling me and I tried to come up with something to say back to him, something that was sharp and could cut him on down. I didn’t think of nothing right away and I knew I wasn’t going to think of anything. I’m not quick like that. Then I thought about having an extra forty dollars.

Forty dollars is not all the money in the world, but if your rent was already paid you could do all right on forty dollars. What you could do was buy some evaporated milk in cans and put them under the bed. Then no matter what happened Amiri would have milk. You could buy canned tuna and maybe a twenty-pound bag of rice. “When you coming up?” I asked Billy.

“About a half hour?”

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

I made the cereal for Amiri. I forgot I didn’t have any sugar. He didn’t want the cereal but he was hungry and he ate it. He looked at me and I knew if I smiled he would smile back. That’s what Amiri does. As long as I’m okay he’s okay. Sometimes, when I’m alone at night and I start to cry, he’ll cry, too. He knows when I’m sad, but I don’t know where he got that from. It’s like he was just born knowing stuff about me.

“Amiri, I don’t know what Billy Carroll got in mind,” I said. “I just hope it ain’t no mess. He looks like he’s okay, but you can’t tell with men. I know you won’t be mean to women when you grow up.”

I said it like I was annoyed. I was, too, because I didn’t think I would do just anything for money. But it was getting to be too hard. After Amiri was born I had some spotting and the doctor said I shouldn’t be doing work that was “too strenuous.”