What They Found (17 page)

I told Skeeter I’d be at his house when he got home and I was. I had brought a quart of pepper steak, a quart of shrimp fried rice, and an order of butterfly shrimp.

“Girl, you up to something,” Skeeter said when he saw the food. “You don’t even like shrimp.”

Skeeter only had a little card table with folding legs but I had bought a tablecloth from Job Lot and a white vase with flowers painted on it so it looked nice. I put the plates out and some food while he watched me. I didn’t want to smile or anything, but I knew he was watching and I did smile a little. Also, he knew I had something on my mind. We were getting close like that, with him knowing little things about me and me knowing little things about him, like how he was going to say “no way” when I told him my idea.

“So guess where I was this afternoon?” I said.

“You told me you were going to the clinic,” he said. “How did everything turn out there?”

“It turned out good,” I said. “And I felt good so I walked down to a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, to that big store on the corner. You know which one I
mean? They had all the mannequins dressed in those striped shirts that time?”

“Right down from the Magic Johnson theater.”

“The manager, Mr. Reuben, seemed okay,” I said. “Kind of downtown white. He was wearing his suit inside his office like he thought some television cameras were going to show up or something.”

“Mr. who?”

“Mr. Reuben,” I said. “He’s the one who wants to talk to you.”

“Talk to me about what?” Skeeter had his head back and turned to one side.

“About you setting up a DJ booth in the store,” I said. I finished with the table. “I didn’t get any wonton soup because it didn’t look too fresh.”

“What does this guy know about me and about me being a DJ?” Skeeter said.

So I told him about the guy walking around with the carnation in his lapel looking at me like he was somebody. I told him about me finding the office and asking to speak to Mr. Reuben. I didn’t tell him that I refused to leave until Mr. Reuben came out of his office, but I let him know that I told Mr. Reuben that his store was empty because it was like an undertaking parlor, and that he should have some music and at least talk to Skeeter.

“That he should talk to me?”

“And I said you can set up a DJ studio right in his store and young people would come in and listen to you and think it was a jumping place. We made an appointment with his executive board for Thursday morning at nine-thirty”

“No, that ain’t happening,” Skeeter said. “No way. I can work a party but I don’t know nothing about working no department store—and I don’t even have a suit so there’s no way I’m going to a board meeting Thursday.”

I just sat there at the table with my hands folded in front of me.

“Marisol, honey, I love you and I’m really going to try hard to make a home for us,” Skeeter said. He lifted my hands from my lap and held them in his. “But I’m just Skeeter, baby. Maybe, one day, you know, I’ll get a whole lot of stuff together and be more than I am now, but right now, I’m just plain old Skeeter.”

He did love me and I felt it whenever I was around him. He put his forehead down on his hands, which were still holding mine, and he looked so miserable.

“Would you meet with him just to see how it turns out?”

“Baby, I’m not ready yet,” he said. “You have to understand that.”

“I do,” I said. “It’s just that … I told Dulce that you were going to try. For her. I know she doesn’t understand, either, but maybe she can feel it.”

“Who?”

“I had the sonogram today,” I said. I was crying a little but I got up a smile to go along with it. “The doctor said I was going to have a little girl. And I was thinking that we would name her together, but until we picked out a permanent name I’d call her by the name they used to call my grandmother—Dulce. It means sweet. Is that okay with you?”

“You going to have a girl? You saw one of them pictures of her?”

“Yeah. And I told her you were going to go see Mr. Reuben even though you might not get the job.”

“How you going to tell her that when she can’t understand anything yet?”

“She knows how you feel about her, right?” I said. “And I know you would do anything for her, right?”

All day Wednesday at the donut shop I kept my cell phone off because I didn’t want Skeeter calling me up and saying that he had changed his mind about going to see Mr. Reuben. I knew Mr. Reuben could make him look bad, ask him a whole bunch of questions about where he had worked and where he had went to school, that kind of thing. I felt a little scared for him but if Skeeter got a steady job right in Harlem everything would work out just perfect. I had seen an apartment on 116th Street near the 3 train. It wasn’t anything fancy but I thought we could pull it off. We could have one
bedroom like a studio for Skeeter to practice in for the first year and then, when Dulce got about sixteen months, we could buy a daybed and that would be her bedroom. At first I thought I would put wallpaper in the living room, then I changed my mind and then I changed it back again because I have always wanted an apartment with wallpaper somewhere in it.

Thursday morning I met Skeeter at the employees’ entrance of the store and we went in. We looked good. The security guard looked over his list, found our names, and sent us up to the third floor.

The table we sat at was so big it couldn’t even have fit in Skeeter’s apartment.

“So, your wife tells me that you have a plan to increase the store’s business.” Mr. Reuben sat at the head of the table. There was a woman on one side and two men on the other. One of them was Mr. Carnation. “Tell us about it.”

“I can show you,” Skeeter said. “I can get some music going and people will come in and listen to it. People like music.”

“We don’t need dancers,” Carnation said. “We need people who buy clothing.”

“That’s true, that’s true,” Skeeter said. “But first you need people to walk into the store. Then maybe you have a chance of selling them something. They’ll come and listen and look around and see all the nice stuff you got.”

“What kind of music would you play?” the woman asked.

“In the morning I could play some old-school stuff,” Skeeter said. “Mellow, maybe even a little doo-wop. Then in the afternoon, when school lets out, I could swing into some reggae and a little soul with a touch of hip-hop.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a marketing plan,” Carnation said.

“Doo-wop?” Mr. Reuben said. “You remember Little Anthony and the Imperials?”

“ ‘Tears on My Pillow’!” Skeeter said.

“Yeah, yeah.” Mr. Reuben got a faraway look in his eyes like he was remembering something good. “What was that other thing they did? Shimmy something?”

“ ‘Shimmy Shimmy, Ko Ko Bop’!” Skeeter said.

Right then and there it was a done deal! The next thing we knew we were talking about how much money Skeeter expected. Me and Skeeter had agreed to ask for five hundred dollars a week if it got to talking about money, but when Mr. Reuben asked about doo-wop and Skeeter knew what he was talking about I spoke up and said we could do it for seven hundred a week. It just came out of my mouth.

“Well, that’s a little steep,” Mr. Reuben said. “How about … five hundred and twenty-five dollars?”

Outside Skeeter got weak in his legs and had to lean
against the wall for a while before we went to the subway. I told him to tell Dulce that he had got the job. He looked at me and just smiled.

The next Monday morning he set up on the second floor, across from the shoe department, and started steady-pumping music to the world.

In a few weeks they put in a little music department and put Skeeter inside it and pretty soon the whole joint was jumping, especially after school. And Skeeter was so happy he was smiling all the time.

We had our wedding a month later on 125th Street and St. Nicholas at St. Joseph’s. I wore a white satin dress I bought and my aunt Nilda made me a lace top that looked perfect with it. Skeeter’s old group, the All Star Stompers, played and my mother didn’t bad-mouth anybody during the whole party, which was a miracle all by itself.

By the time Dulce came we had our apartment set up. We had it all looking nice, the bedroom with the crib right across from where I slept so the baby crying didn’t wake Skeeter. Even the kitchen was set up just right.

Dulce was a real good baby. While I was looking after her all day I kept making plans. One was that the other All Stars could do the DJ business in other places if they had somebody to pull it together. Skeeter could be their business manager if he thought about it.

I took Dulce in her stroller to the Chinese take-out
place and while we were waiting for the sweet-and-sour chicken and the butterfly shrimps I told her all about Skeeter and my new plan. “You think Daddy’s going to like being a manager?” She smiled.

“N
oee what are you going to do in the evenings if we start closing the shop earlier?” Abeni looked over the top of
Ebony.

I knew what was behind the question. The hints had been coming in heavily casual comments, remarks meant to appear offhand, gentle words that crept into my sister’s conversation and my mother’s suggestion that we should all “get out more.”

Abeni had broken up with Harrison but had started up a steady stream of e-mails with him as his career as an independent filmmaker grew. It was me they were worried about.

Other girls my age seemed to know what to do. They came to the shop thinking about how to look better, and
told elaborate stories about the mating game. I watched little girls on the street, jumping rope or dancing, shaking their hips as if they were born knowing something that I didn’t. I knew how the parts worked, that somehow when a man came near me, when he expressed an interest, I was supposed to know what to do, what to say. At the shop I had heard the talk, seen the smiles, the nods, the finger snaps. What I didn’t know was why it didn’t seem natural to me. I was seventeen and a lot of boys and a lot of men looked at me and offered up their word games but I didn’t know how to play them.

Abeni was taking courses at City College, inching her way to a degree, but she was more interested in the beauty culture business than anything else. As much as I told myself that what I wanted to do was to spend my evenings reading, to talk about what was going on in the world, not just who was sleeping with who, I was beginning to feel that there was something wrong with me.

At times I was lonely, but it was a bearable loneliness, the way I imagined that a star, brilliant in a Milky Way of other stars, would be lonely.

Taking the creative writing course was not an answer so much as it was a refuge. I knew Abeni wanted me to go with her to some of the clubs downtown, but she let it drop when I said I was taking the course.

There were eleven people in the class. Six of them were older women who had taken the course before.
There was a young boy who wanted to write raps, an older man who had already published a detective novel, a severe-looking brother who wore a button that said BLACK
MUSLIM and who wanted to reveal the Truth About the White Man, and Kyle Scott.

Kyle was six feet, maybe an inch more, and lean like some of the brothers who played basketball. When the instructor asked what we did he said he worked in the post office and was trying to get the money together to go to school full-time. He was serious-looking and I thought he really wanted to be a writer full-time but was shy about saying it. He also had a nice smile and a great voice. There was warmth in his voice, as if he cared about whatever it was he was saying.

One of the older women suggested we all stop for coffee after the class. Some of us did, including Kyle. We talked about films we had seen or hoped to see, the hot political topics, and books.

“Harlem has always had an amazing literary tradition,” said one woman, a retired social worker. “I think storytelling is an important part of our heritage.”

Kyle nodded. He knew a lot about the Harlem Renaissance and had read far more than I had. He didn’t talk much during the meeting but what he said made sense. I didn’t talk much, either, but I enjoyed hearing the others.

By the fourth week the after-class group had dwindled
to just some of the older ladies, the man who had been published, me, and Kyle. It was on a particularly warm March night, after our coffee group, when Kyle asked me where I worked.

“My family has a beauty shop on a Hundred and Forty-fifth. We live down the block from the shop.”

“Do you walk uptown?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“If you’re walking tonight, would you mind if I walked along?”

“Fine.” I felt myself smiling, and now the embarrassment came in a sudden flush.

The night was warm and Malcolm X Boulevard was alive with the early-spring noises of Harlem. Music blared from the small shops or from radios set up on fire escapes outside the old tenements. Children who should have been busy doing homework were still in the streets and on 139th Street a man and woman were cooking sausages on a grill.

“You write well,” Kyle said. “I liked the character studies you read tonight.”

“Thank you.”

As we walked I realized that I should have said something more to him, but everything I thought of seemed wrong. He had read some of his poetry and I thought it was quite good, far above the others in the class, but I wasn’t sure how to criticize it and I didn’t want to just say that I liked it.

He asked me if I went to school and I told him I was a senior at Wadleigh. He said he imagined that I had already selected a college.

“I’m not sure if I want to go to college,” I said. “And you? You said you were saving money for school.”

“Somewhere I can learn more about writing.”

“Oh, I thought so,” I said. “I mean … you write well.”

“Uh, Noee, I have a poem I’d like you to see,” Kyle said. “It wasn’t something I wanted to read in class. Would you mind? You could bring it back next week.”

“Why didn’t you want to read it in class?”

“Well, it’s kind of personal,” Kyle said, nodding his head in self-agreement. “I was thinking about you during the week, wondering how I would describe you in words. The poem came from those thoughts.”