I Wish I Had a Red Dress (5 page)

“Just walked in,” Nate said, slipping gracefully out of his coat and handing it to Bill. “I was complimenting Joyce on the music.”

Bill was delighted. “You into
timba brava?
”

“I grew up listening to it,” Nate said. “My father liked everything about Cuba except Castro. He took the revolution
personal.
”

“Was he Cuban?”

Nate shook his head. “He was a Pullman porter, but he used to travel as a personal valet to some black gangsters who went down to Havana two or three times a year. Castro put an end to all that in ’59. My father never forgave him.”

Sister walked in from the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel. When she saw Nate, her face lit up in a warm smile.

“Just in time,” she said. “Welcome!”

“Thank you,” he said.

Sister turned to me. “Did you meet Joyce?”

“He caught me doing what I thought was a very private mambo,” I said, looking at how tiny Sister looked standing beside him.

Bill was delighted. “You were dancing?”

“Good for you,” said Sister quickly, heading Bill off at the pass before he could start teasing me again. “Why don’t you get Nate something to drink?”

“Sure,” Bill said, not through with me by a long shot. “You’re not going to break out again while I’m out of the room, are you?”

“I’ll try to restrain myself,” I said.

Nate stood leaning easily against the mantel, smiling and looking big. I sat down on the couch wondering how many times
he’s been asked about the weather up there, and how long I could resist the temptation to inquire.

“Sit down, sit down,” Sister said. “You have any trouble finding us?”

Nate shook his big head, which was perfectly shaped without any lumps, rolls or razor bumps, and claimed a space at the other end of the couch. I waited for the end I was sitting on to rise up like a teeter-totter.

“Not a bit,” he said. “I’ve been finding my way around pretty good, so far. Once I figure out which roads dead-end at the lakes, I’ll be fine.”

That’s the biggest frustration for newcomers. A street that begins in a dense grove of pine trees can open up into a sandy strip of beach with no warning.

“The only good thing about getting lost up here,” I said as Bill returned with a frosted glass for Nate and a pitcher to refresh the rest of our drinks, “is that anybody you ask can probably tell you how to get where you’re going.”

“Men never get lost,” Bill said. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you that?”

“No,” I said. “I must have been absent that day.”

“How’s the house hunting?” Sister sounded sympathetic.

Nate groaned. “I haven’t had time to make much progress. I’m still at the Motel 6.”

“All the way out on the highway?” I said.

He nodded. “I’ve been at the school until late every day, so I haven’t really had time to look around.”

“I know a place you might be interested in,” I said. “It’s lakefront. Is that okay?”

He smiled. “That’s a trick question, right?”

“Why?”

“Given a chance, is there anybody who doesn’t want to have water outside their front window?”

I wondered if he liked to swim, but I refused to allow myself to imagine how he’d look in a bathing suit. “If you’re going to be at the school tomorrow, I can drop off the key and the directions. You can go over and take a look.”

“I’ll make it a point to be there,” he said, looking relieved.

“Good,” I said. “Around four-thirty or so?”

“Great!”

He was practically beaming. Sister was too, but I ignored her. I was just being
neighborly.

“Well, there you go,” Bill said. “The beauty of small-town living.”

Nate nodded his agreement. “Absolutely!”

“So other than the Motel 6,” I said, “how do you like it up here so far?”

“It’s great,” he said enthusiastically, clasping and unclasping his big hands. “I was really ready to get out of the city for a while.”

“How long have you been teaching?”

I wondered how students reacted when they encountered him in the hallways of Baldwin High. It made me remember the scene in
The Green Mile
where Michael Clarke Duncan’s character first enters the prison and the white guards behold this black behemoth in tattered overalls and immediately share one thought:
What the hell are we gonna do if this big Negro goes off?
Nate was that kind of big.

“Five years,” he said. “I was a Detroit beat cop for six years before that, until it occurred to me that my time might be better spent trying to interpret these young brothers
before
I had to put the cuffs on them.”

“Well, don’t give up on those cuffs just yet,” Bill said. “The semester’s just getting started good.”

“Stop being cynical,” I said. “He just got here!”

“Thank you,” Nate said. “If I wanted to be cynical, I could have stayed in Detroit.”

“That’s no challenge,” Bill said. “It’s easy being cynical in a place like Detroit. Up here, it takes a much greater effort.”

Nate laughed, a sound not unlike the rumble of thunder. “But it’s not
required,
right?”

“Not only is it not required,” Sister said. “On this particular night, it’s absolutely forbidden!”

“Amen!”
I chimed in.

Bill turned to Nate with a rueful grin. “See what happens when you get two or more women together in one place? They start outlawing things!”

“Our dispositions improve dramatically when we’re well fed,” I said, feeling a little light-headed after two margaritas on an almost empty stomach and the unanticipated rush of adrenaline Nate’s appearance had precipitated.

“Then I have only one more thing to say.” Bill stood up and looked at his watch.

We all looked at him expectantly.

“Dinner is served!”

IF YOU COUNT THE
mangoes, Nate was my second surprise in as many days. He was smart and funny and he had opinions without being overbearing. Conversation at dinner ranged from the plans for our anti-Super Bowl party to his stint as a Detroit cop, to my recent misadventures in the hallowed halls of government, to Bill’s poem-in-progress and Sister’s hope to do an Idlewild oral history before too many more of her members made their transitions and took their stories with them.

By the time we moved back into the living room with coffee and Sister’s homemade apple pie, we were talking like old friends, and I had almost gotten used to the way he towered over the rest of us, even when we were sitting down.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get bored in a little town like this?” I said to Nate, taking the seat next to him on the couch.

“That’s sort of the whole point, isn’t it?” he said.

“Boredom?” Sister sounded surprised, curling up like a cat in her favorite chair.

“No,” Nate said, watching Bill add another log to the fire. “The fact that it’s a little town. You can still make a real difference in a place this size. That means a lot to me.”

Bill sat down on the arm of Sister’s chair. “Don’t start romanticizing, brother. It ain’t Detroit, but it ain’t Nirvana either.”

Nate smiled. “I don’t know as much as you all do about Idlewild yet, but I can tell you this. The big cities are gone and most of the middle-size towns are already touch and go. If we can’t figure out how to fix what’s broke in a little bitty place like this, we might as well just throw in the towel.”

“That’s not an option,” Sister said, always the optimist.

“It’s never a conscious choice,” Nate said slowly, looking into the fire and choosing his words carefully. “The jobs dry up and the businesses move elsewhere and the trash doesn’t get collected anymore and the jails are too crowded and there’s crack everywhere. . . .”

That sure sounded like Detroit. Last time I drove down with Sister, I stopped at a traffic light and every person that passed in front of my car had that gray, frantic,
too skinny to be alive much longer
look that is all the identification crackheads require.

“But it doesn’t happen all on the same day.” Nate was looking at me, and I looked right back. “It happens little by little and you accommodate it like that, little by little, until one day, you look up and you’re living in a war zone.”

He turned back to Sister. “When I was a cop we always dreaded Halloween because that’s when the young brothers collectively lose their minds. They rob the trick-or-treaters. They do home invasions when people open their front doors to give out
candy. They throw concrete blocks off the freeway overpasses, and they set lots of fires.”

I knew he wasn’t exaggerating. Seven years ago, I was there for a conference. You could look out the window of the hotel and see the flames. I remember the sound of sirens and the smell of smoke.

Bill draped an arm around the back of Sister’s chair and frowned. “I thought all that stopped after the Million Man March.”

That’s what I had thought too. I remember pictures of black men in groups of three and four standing, unarmed, on the corners of their communities, keeping watch, keeping peace, doing what good men are supposed to do, keeping an eye on the others so they don’t act a fool.

“Two years.” Nate shook his head like he was still incredulous at how quickly things went back to normal, if burning down your own neighborhood can be classified as normal, even in Detroit. “That’s as long as the brothers could sustain the effort. First year, they had patrols on every corner. Second year, they had less than half that many. By the third year, we were the only people on the street again. Just cops, and a few little kids whose parents didn’t care that they were out trying to trick-or-treat on a battlefield.”

Raising sane children in a place like that must be like learning how to swim in a whirlpool, I thought. Maybe it’s not impossible, but close enough.

“I think,” Bill said into the silence, “that every generation of men looks to test itself in battle. These young brothers didn’t have an outside war, so they made up one in their backyard.”

I never understood the idea of war as a manhood test. It requires and develops such a specific set of skills that the next
question has to be how do you translate the things that make a great soldier into the things that women want and children need from that very same man once the war is over?

At this point, brothers usually remind me that the war is
not
over, and I can’t argue with that, but I also know the most lethal campaign being waged by black men is not against white men. It’s against the women they say they love and the children they don’t make time to care for—and what kind of manhood test is that?

This line of reasoning was not going to do much for my disposition. Besides, Sister had said no worrying allowed tonight, so I turned to her for assistance.

“You think they’d be open to another kind of manhood test,” I said, hoping she’d follow my lead. “A dance contest or something?”

She grinned at me like she knew exactly what I was doing. “How about karaoke?”

“Good one,” I said. “Or bid whist.”

“Double Dutch,” she said, nodding. “Snow shoveling.”

We were on a roll. Bill and Nate, unsure of the proper response to this sudden swerve toward frivolity, looked at each other uncertainly.

“Hula-Hoops,” I said, looking at Nate. “Pie eating.”

“I think,” Bill said slowly, “this means it’s time to change the subject.”

Nate looked at me real hard and then he grinned a grin as big as he was and held out his plate to Sister. “Speak for yourself, man. I’m a pie-eatin’ somethin’ when I put my mind to it!”

We all laughed then, partly because it was funny, but partly because forgetting how to have a good time on Saturday night is as lethal as smoking crack. It just takes a little longer to kill you.

“I LIKE HIM,” SISTER
said after we had all reluctantly decided it was time to say good night and Nate had headed back to the Motel 6.

“I liked him too.”

Bill, as always the perfect combination of liberated partner and traditional husband, had gone outside to brush the snow off my windshield and warm up the car. The idea of staying inside his cozy kitchen while I scraped the back window would never have occurred to him. He saw me watching out the window and blew me a kiss. Bill loves an audience.

“I thought you might,” Sister said.

She was holding my coat with a look of pure innocence, which didn’t fool me for a second.

“Stop matchmaking. I’m old enough to be his mother.”

“You are not!” she said. “He’s forty if he’s a day.”

“He’s thirty,
max,
” I said, zipping up my coat. “Thanks for dinner. Next time, my place.”

“Shall we invite Nate?”

“Sure,” I said, remembering the low rumble of his laugh and wondering how much bigger he’d look in the confines of my tiny kitchen. “The more the merrier.”

“Good,” she said, beaming.

“You’re incorrigible! Good night!” I laughed, slipping out fast to let in a minimum of cold air and to cut off any further conversation about Nate’s romantic potential. I liked him, but I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. I had the best and I’m not greedy. Besides, Sister’s wrong. I know plenty of fifteen-year-old mothers.

Bill was patiently scraping the ice from my back windshield.

“Want some help?” I said.

He shook his head, chipping away methodically at the last stubborn corner. “You’re wrong, you know.”

“About what?”

“About me not knowing any love poems.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, lobbing a soft snowball in his general direction. “Let’s hear one.”

“Poets don’t work on demand,” he said, dodging it easily. “You should know that.”

The air was so cold and clear I wanted to drink it like water. “Then what good are they?”

That made him laugh. “Philistine!” he said, finishing up and stashing the scraper back in the trunk. “Okay! Here’s one just for you.”

He closed his eyes and touched his right temple lightly like he was receiving a transmission from Venus.

“A Poem for Joyce,” he said, starting slowly, as all things associated with love are wont to do. “This woman/who cannot surrender/without freedom/who will not surrender/without peace . . .” He hesitated for a moment, searching for the right words, finding them. “This woman is so brand new/It’s all I can do . . .” He opened his eyes triumphantly. “Just to love her.”

“Show-off!” I said, kissing his cold cheek.

“Watch it.” He pointed to Sister smiling in the window. “My wife doesn’t play that stuff.”

“Your wife is a saint,” I said, climbing into my car.

“That’s what you think,” Bill said, grinning as he slammed the door behind me and took his back steps two at a time.

And just for a minute, I was jealous of their closeness; envious of the fact that after they cleared the table and washed the dishes, they were going to crawl into bed with each other to ward off the chill. It’s been so long since I’ve fallen asleep with someone’s arms around me that I should be used to sleeping alone, but I guess it’s like getting older. No matter how many times you celebrate those postforty birthdays, you’re never quite ready to
greet that woman of a certain age
looking back at you from the bathroom mirror.