If You Come Softly (7 page)

Jeremiah nodded. “Zimbabwe, huh?”

“Yeah. My daddy doesn’t like the heat. And Mama got sick last time she went to Africa. Figure they wouldn’t follow me there.”

Jeremiah smiled and shook his head. “You crazy, man.”

“Yeah, I’m crazy-but at least I’ll be crazy and far away.”

He started singing softly—a song about being somewhere on the other side of the ocean. It was a pretty song—sad and quiet. Jeremiah rested his head against the banister and listened. Carlton had a good voice. His father was a musician, and some nights Jeremiah would walk by their building and he’d hear the two of them harmonizing. Those nights, his heart felt like it was closing up inside his chest and he missed his own father so much it hurt.

“Carlton ...” he said softly now.

Carlton stopped singing and rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. He was quiet for a moment and Jeremiah looked away from him, embarrassed suddenly. He wondered if Carlton had been crying.

“Yo,” Carlton said after a few moments had passed. “What’s up?”

“What’s it like, man—to have a white mama and a black daddy?”

“You have a black daddy.”

“I know. I want to know about the other part though—what’s that like?”

Carlton shrugged and stared straight ahead. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know any other way. My dad’s a good man. My moms is a good woman. It’s weird sometimes—you know—like when we go out west to visit her family. They’re so ... so stiff around us—they’re not like my mama. You know how she is—she’s cool. I don’t feel like they’re my people—I never really did even though I know they are.... And sometimes people stare when me and my moms and dad are together, like they’re trying to figure it all out or something. Black people and white people. And sometimes they kind of look at us like, ‘Oh, I get it—it’s an interracial thing.’ You know. Like that. I think Colette went to England to get away from it all.”

Jeremiah nodded. He had had a crush on Carlton’s sister. When they were younger he used to try to tease her just to get her to smile. Sometimes she’d tickle him until he thought he’d pass out. And he would scream, begging her to stop, wanting her to stop but hoping she wouldn’t. Colette always smacked them gently on the head before leaving them alone. Jeremiah touched the side of his head now. That was years ago, but whenever he thought about it, he could feel the imprint of her hand.

“I’m going to jet out there next summer,” Carlton was saying. “I miss her. I mean she was a pain sometimes, but when you only have one sister, you learn to let them be a pain sometimes and just ignore that part of their personality....”

His voice drifted off.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Yeah—it’s kind of crazy, don’t you think? You sitting up in that big house an only child. Your parents could have filled it with four or five kids and still had room to throw a party if they wanted to.”

“Could of. Yo, Carl—I need to speak with you about something.”

Carl looked at him without saying anything.

“I met this girl at school-this white girl.”

“Yeah—and...”

“I don’t know. I just never really thought about that—about dating a white girl.”

Carlton smiled. “What makes you think she’s thought about dating
you?”

“I don’t know.” He looked up at his father’s window. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know
nothing
about
nothing.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean—me and that girl-her name’s Ellie—we barely said anything to each other. But it’s strange ...” He looked at Carlton. “It’s like I know her—like I can look inside her and see everything. I know it sounds craz—”

“You sound like you’re in love, man.”

Jeremiah frowned. “Nah. I don’t even know her.” But he remembered that first day, bending with her to pick up her books in the hallway. Something inside him went cold that morning-cold and hot all at once. “I couldn’t even tell you her last name.” He was thoughtful for a moment. “But I was sitting next to her in class today-and I don’t know—I felt like we ... like we should always be next to each other. I don’t know.”

Carlton stood up and tucked the ball under his arm. “Sounds like love, man.”

“But she’s
white.”

Carlton raised an eyebrow. “Hello, Miah. Look who you talking to, man. It happens. And you know what? It ain’t the worst thing in the world.”

THE APARTMENT WAS EMPTY AND STILL. I STOOD AT THE foot of the stairway watching the yellow-gold sunlight stream in from the living room window, and listening to the messages on the answering machine. My father had called from the hospital to say hello. Marc had called and the twins. And Susan—my older sister who was a therapist in Santa Cruz. She was more like an aunt than a sister—older and distant the way grown-ups can be. I pressed the “save” button and sat down on the bottom stair, leaning my head against the banister.

Anne was different. Even though she’s ten years older, she acted silly sometimes. I missed that Anne—the one that laughed so hard, whatever she was drinking came out of her nose. The Anne who had taken me on the Staten Island ferry when I was ten and surprised me with a cooler full of vendor hotdogs—all done up with onions and sauerkraut and mustard the way I loved them.

I closed my eyes now, remembering how me and Anne sat devouring hotdogs and watching the city grow smaller behind us as the ship pulled away from it.

Where was that Anne now? Marion had spoken to her a couple of times, but she never asked for me, the way she always used to. I pressed my forehead against the banister and swallowed. What had I done that was so wrong?

I heard Marion’s key in the door and got up, not wanting her to see me sitting like this.

“Marion ...?” I called, heading into the kitchen.

My father was standing at the refrigerator, pulling out sandwich meat and mayonnaise.

“No—not Marion—Edward—Dad to you. Why do you torture your mother like that, Ellie?” my father asked, his eyes twinkling. They were gray-blue like Anne and Ruben’s.

I kissed him on the cheek. “That’s why. Because
you
call me Ellie and she calls me Elisha.”

He sliced some bread from a loaf Marion had baked a few days before and started piling turkey onto it.

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.”

My father nodded. He looked tired and thin in his blue shirt and khakis, his stethoscope dangling from his pocket. His hair was like mine, but the curls were gray now and starting to thin.

“In the emergency room this week. All week. Wouldn’t be surprised if they had to throw
me
up on a table.”

“You shouldn’t work so hard, Daddy.” I poured a glass of juice and set it on the table then put his sandwich on a plate. “I missed you this Sunday.”

We used to spend Sunday afternoons together, sitting and reading the
New York Times.
In the middle of an article, my father would frown and press his thumb against a paragraph. “Listen to this crazy thing that’s happening, Ellie,” he’d say, then slowly read, overemphasizing paragraphs he thought outrageous. And I’d lean back against the fireplace wall—I always sat on the floor those afternoons—with my ankles crossed, my eyes closed in concentration.

“Sunday afternoon,” my father said, smiling, “this intern came in carrying the Times and I thought—I’m not going to read it until I can read it with my Ellie.”

“You didn’t even glance at it?”

He shook his head solemnly. “Didn’t even see what books were being reviewed. But this Sunday—back to the olden days.” He laughed, sat down at the table across from me, and took a bite of his sandwich.

I leaned on my hand, watching him. It’s hard to remember when the ritual of reading the Times with my father began. When I was small I remember sitting on the floor, listening to him read. Of course, Marion disapproved. Every Sunday, as she fussed about the kitchen preparing dinner, she’d punctuate our quiet time with complaints.
Elisha should be out—with friends her own age. Go to a museum. Go to a movie. Get off your rump. You’re becoming an old man.
And my father would wink
at me. And what’s wrong with becoming an old man?
he’d called to Marion, who’d make annoyed noises and say,
Don’t be ridiculous.

He lifted his glasses now, rubbed his eyes, and smiled.

I got up, poured myself a glass of orange juice, and sat back down across from him.

“So tell me about this boy Marion says you met at Percy.”

I frowned and didn’t say anything.

“Oh—don’t go getting upset, Ellie. Your mother just mentioned it in passing—that you had met someone you liked. Anne told her.”

“What else did Anne say?”

My father shrugged. “Nothing. She said to ask you. What would
you
say?”

“Nothing. There isn’t a boy, Daddy. Just this guy I met who—nothing.” Where would I begin anyway? In the same place I tried to begin with stupid Anne?

“Are we going to get to meet this, this nothing?”

My father was smiling, but I didn’t feel like smiling back.

I reached across the table and picked a piece of turkey out of what was left of his sandwich.

“His name is Jeremiah,” I said slowly. “I don’t remember his last name. Rosedale or something. On the first day of school I dropped my books and then he helped me pick them up and then I don’t know. Now he’s in my history class.”

“Is he nice?”

I shrugged. “We didn’t really talk a whole lot, but he seems nice. And Mr. Hazelton wants us to remember all twenty-seven amendments by Friday. Jeremiah says he knows them already. In order.”

My father whistled, impressed. “Do you know what his parents do?”

I took a swallow of orange juice. “Don’t care.”

He smiled. “And why should you?” He finished his sandwich and pushed the plate away. “Well, he sounds nice enough. And if he’s smart I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t be friends.”

“I didn’t know you and Marion were looking for reasons.” I felt myself getting mad again.

“Not reasons-excuses, I guess. We don’t want our baby leaving the nest just yet. It makes us feel old.” He stood up, reached over and touched my cheek. “It reminds us that one day this house will be empty-no children, just two ancient people padding through it looking at pictures.”

“I’m not going anywhere just yet, Daddy. You got a whole’ nother three years of me.”

“Three years isn’t a long time, Ellie. You’ll see.”

I sat at the kitchen table long after my father had gone upstairs to take a nap. Something about what he had said depressed me. Yes, of course I’d leave the way my sisters and brothers had. But that did seem like a long time away. Each day seemed to crawl slowly into the next and the next, and some nights I couldn’t sleep with the excitement of a new day—and another chance to see Jeremiah. Maybe this was what love felt like. I turned the empty orange juice glass around and around in my hand. Was it lying that I didn’t tell him Jeremiah was black? Why should that matter? Why did any of it matter?

Outside, the sun was setting over Central Park. I pressed my hand to my lips—wondering what it would feel like to kiss Jeremiah. Wondering if I’d always be wondering.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT, JEREMIAH STOOD IN his mother’s room, running his hands over her dresser, softly fingering the bottles of lotion and the pictures in silver frames—him at two in a diaper and T-shirt, pointing at her, her smiling into the camera, the two of them walking in a park somewhere—maybe he was five in that one. And then at the far end of her dresser, in a tiny frame, a picture of her in a wedding dress, holding a bouquet of white roses. Jeremiah picked it up and stared at it. His mother was smiling and looking off, away from the camera. Maybe to where his father stood. His father. Jeremiah bit down on his bottom lip. Where was he right now? With Lois Ann somewhere. Once he had run into them in Manhattan—his father and Lois Ann, walking slowly down Spring Street, his father’s arm around Lois Ann’s shoulder. And for a moment, as he walked toward them, Jeremiah had thought Lois Ann was his mother and he had smiled. And his father had smiled back, cautiously, slowly, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing—his son walking toward him, smiling.

How long had it been since Jeremiah had smiled in the presence of the two of them. Months maybe. He had smiled that first day, years and years ago, when he didn’t know anything—before the news of his father’s affair got out. He had come home to find his father sitting with Lois Ann on their stoop, and he had smiled. Smiled because it was so rare to find his father home relaxing, a glass of wine in one hand and a copy of a video in the other. “I been waiting for you to get home from school,” his father had said. “Figured we could watch this movie together.” And Jeremiah had smiled even wider—because he was young then, maybe twelve or thirteen, and he didn’t know the ways people—his parents-could hurt each other. Yeah—he was only twelve or thirteen, and he didn’t know that Lois Ann and his father had a thing going on, a heavy thing that would eventually break the family apart.

Jeremiah squinted at the picture now. He could feel tears coming on, a thick knot of them rising up in the back of his throat. It had to do with this picture of his mother in her wedding dress and October and the lazy afternoon sun streaming through the window. It had to do with Ellie and Percy Academy and the fact that maybe he was a little bit in love with a white girl he barely knew. But mostly—right now, standing in his mama’s room holding this picture close, it had to do with them, his parents.

They had married in Prospect Park-in the boathouse—on an amazingly blue day in October. It would be seventeen years tomorrow. Seventeen years ago, they had thought they’d be together forever—and in some ways, seventeen years is forever. Eleven movies in seventeen years. Three books-and maybe his mother would have written more if she hadn’t had him. And maybe that’s why they never had another one. But the only child thing—that had stopped mattering so much a long time ago. Yeah, sometimes he wanted a brother or sister, but it was more than that. He wanted more than that too-somebody deep. Somebody who could know him—know all of him—the crazy things he dreamed on stormy nights, when he woke with tears in his eyes and pulled the covers tight around him. How alone he felt most days-even with his homeboys surrounding him—the way the loneliness settled deep inside of him and lingered.