The Warmest December (13 page)

“Fine,” she said and walked out. She pulled the door closed behind her.

I could hear Bugs Bunny outwitting Daffy Duck and Malcolm’s soft giggles sailing in from the living room. I imagined it was just after eight and both he and Delia would be leaving soon. Hy-Lo would be home from work an hour later.

My bladder was full and I squeezed my legs together against the pressure. The noise from the television stopped and Malcolm called to me from the living room: “See ya later, pencil-head!”

I rolled my eyes and turned onto my back, waiting to hear the heavy sound of the front door closing and the turn of the lock. I heard the door close but a blaring siren outside my window masked the sound of the turning lock.

Finally alone, I got up and slowly opened the door to my room. The low sound of the kitchen radio filled the emptiness of the house. My parents always kept the radio on—to deter would-be burglars.

I started toward the bathroom, but for some reason my feet led me to the living room. I stood staring down at the record player, convincing myself to reach in and get the gun. I was about to kneel down when I heard the crystal-clear sound of glass clinking against glass.

The blood drained from my head and I could feel my world about to spin. I bit down hard on the inside of my mouth and forced myself to take a shaky step toward the kitchen. What I’d imagined I would see was a man, dressed in black, a stocking cap covering his face with holes cut out for his eyes and mouth. He would have a large sack and would be dumping the silverware Mable gave Delia as a wedding gift into his sack.

What I saw instead was my mother leaning up against the refrigerator smoking a cigarette. She had just taken a sip out of one of the daisy-printed water glasses; her lipstick looked like a bloody fingerprint on top of the pale yellow petals of the painted flowers. Hy-Lo’s half-empty bottle of vodka sat open on the stove.

I watched her tilt that bottle three times before she finally closed it up and placed it back on the counter behind the container of sugar.

She ran the water from the faucet into the glass and drank deeply, holding the water and then swishing it around in her mouth before swallowing. She took one last drag of her cigarette before shoving the burning tip beneath the rushing water.

When she turned around I was there with my hands folded across my chest.

She didn’t speak for a long time, her face was blank, and that tawny color had returned to her eyes. Suddenly she didn’t look so nice, her stature sloped, and her lips needed a fresh coat of color.

“Go back to bed or get dressed for school,” she said and then grabbed her purse up from the table. “Lock the door behind me,” she muttered as she walked past me and out the door.

Chapter Nine

I
was still thinking about Delia’s drinking problem when I arrived at Kings County Hospital the next day. She no longer had one, thank God. The hardest thing she drank now was coffee and Pepsi. Delia was the only one of us who had just stopped—no therapy, thirty-day detox, or court order. She just woke up one morning and decided she’d had enough. Delia was the strong one, although it had taken me years to realize that.

She had never really been a drinker, not even socially, but being around Hy-Lo made you do things you would not normally do.

I don’t know when she started, but it wasn’t long before she needed a drink to get her going in the morning and one to settle her down at night.

“You think it’s easy dealing with your father?” she would spit at me every time I walked in on her taking a drink.

Our lives were already hard dealing with one drunk and I wanted to ask her how it would get better with her drinking too. But the alcohol had sharpened her tongue and her patience was wearing thinner each day.

She spent most of her time in bed staring at the television, refusing to take phone calls from the small circle of friends she was able to maintain over the years. When she did happen to answer the phone she lied her way out of a conversation, claiming she was just walking out the door or had only just come in from work.

Our diet had moved from full-cooked meals to TV dinners, Chinese takeout, overcooked burgers and undercooked fries from the diner.

Sunday was the only day she cooked and then it was something that didn’t require a lot of time or energy. Those meals were bland and tasteless and usually ended up in the garbage beneath the tin cans and the plastic bread wrapping.

The bickering and fighting continued, and as nasty and violent as I had thought it was in the past, that was no comparison to what it had now come to.

For years my mother accused my father of seeking his courage from a bottle. If I had not believed that statement, Delia’s transformation would have proven it without a shadow of a doubt.

She no longer backed away from Hy-Lo’s words or his fists. They pounded on each other as often as newlyweds made love. While both of them walked away with battle scars, Delia was the one who took the brunt of the beatings.

Her arms and legs held nasty purple-blue marks that swelled and bulged through her clothes. Her face had been slapped and punched so many times that it started to look lopsided.

Her screams and his heavy breathing broke my sleep as he labored with the strength it took to throw her up against the walls of our apartment.

The Lowe family had become the talk of the building and our neighbors began to look on me with even more pity, if that were possible.

“Pinky said maybe it would be best if I don’t spend so much time in your house,” Glenna said one day as we walked home from school. Her words came out quick as if a dam in her mouth had broken.

I didn’t look at her; I just shifted my book bag to the other shoulder and kept on walking.

“We heard them last night, you know.” Her words were slowing up. “Everybody heard,” she added and moved her own book bag.

I didn’t want to talk about it. I knew everybody heard. The whole block probably heard. Who wouldn’t hear a man screaming and threatening to burn down the building at three in the morning? But even that would have been bearable. People threaten crazy things at that hour in the morning. I’d heard worse from the people across the courtyard. No, his words were the least embarrassing part.

Glenna cleared her throat and then continued. “Um, I heard Tyrone’s mother telling Mr. Henry that she saw …” Her voice trailed off. She was searching for the right words and a tone that didn’t make her sound too eager to know.

Sonia Baker was Tyrone’s mother. She lived right across the hall from my family. Mr. Henry was an old Jewish man who owned the vegetable store on the corner.

Glenna jumped in front of me and our heads collided. “She said your mom and dad was fighting out in the hallway— naked?”

I rubbed my forehead and looked deep into Glenna’s eyes. I wanted to slap her right across her black face. I wanted to shove her against the brick wall and punch her until she doubled over in pain and her nose started to bleed. At that moment I hated her and the simple life she had.

She was always whining and complaining about her mother never being home. Did she know what I would do to be alone, really alone?

No Malcolm, no Delia, and best of all no Hy-Lo. I would give my left arm and my eyesight.

The anger welled up in me and I felt it pushing through the top of my head. I clenched my fists and walked around her.

“Kenzie!” she yelled after me and then put her hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it away.

Why couldn’t she wait for me to tell her the story? Why couldn’t she wait until my shame had withered to warm humiliation and I took her to my room and whispered the embarrassing details?

I would tell her that it had been quiet for two days. No arguing, no fighting, just silence. I would describe how he’d been sick with the flu for most of the week and how the medicine and the liquor were turning his stomach and kept him in the bathroom. He couldn’t do both so he stuck with the medicine, knowing that in a few days he would be able to drink again. I would leave out the fact that Delia was doing her own drinking.

I would tilt my head back and take a deep breath before I revealed the time the commotion started. Perhaps I would say midnight instead of two, because midnight seemed so much more sinister.

“They were fucking.” I would use that word because nasty words like that were forbidden and would cause us both look over our shoulders to make doubly sure that we were alone. “But something happened, he wanted something else that she wouldn’t do.”

Our minds would run away with the intimate details we’d read over and over again in the Harold Robbins paperbacks my mother kept hidden in her underwear drawer. We would each pick one illicit detail and imagine it was the one Delia simply would not and could not do for Hy-Lo.

“Anyway.” I would wave my hand in the air dismissing those erotic images, because talking about my parents’ sexual practices made me feel unclean. “She ran out of the room and into the bathroom. She was crying and he was pulling at her arm, trying to get her back in the bedroom.”

Glenna would scoot closer to me and look deep into my eyes as if my words could somehow turn my irises into a moving-picture screen.

“I don’t know what happened then. He got mad and hit her hard upside her head. He started yelling at her and accused her of doing
it
with everybody in the building while he was at work.

“She ran toward the kitchen, where he caught her by the hair and dragged her to the front door.”

Glenna would have to lick her lips and remember to keep breathing.

“He opened the door and shoved her naked out into the hall.”

I would nod my head up and down at Glenna’s wideopen mouth.

“She just stood there screaming and crying, trying to cover her private parts.”

I would have to take my own deep breath and maybe look down at my cuticles, hoping there would be something there for me to pick at after I told my shame.

“He closed the door and then opened it again because she was screaming her head off. Screaming and crying. Waking up the whole building.

“He called her a stupid bitch and forgot that he was butt naked too and went after her in the hall. They didn’t stop until my grandmother came up and pulled them off of each other.”

The story would leave us low on sugar and we would have to consume two packs of Now and Laters plus an Italian ice.

That’s how it would have been, but Glenna had jumped the gun and ruined our whole routine.

I kept walking and she fell into step beside me. We walked in silence until we came to the front of the building. “If you can’t be my friend anymore, I understand.” My words were out before I knew I’d even thought them.

Glenna looked at me and shook her head. She walked in ahead of me and held the door. I stepped into the hall waiting for her response. “See you tomorrow,” she said and disappeared up the stairs.

* * *

“That was embarrassing,” I heard myself say bitterly,

“’Scuse me?” the man’s voice floated around the curtain again. “Miss?” he called out after some time had passed and I still did not respond.

When had I climbed the stairs and pulled up the chair?

My last recollection was walking from the bus stop toward the hospital and now here I was facing Hy-Lo once more.

I looked down at the green pass the hospital issued; it was clutched tightly in my hands. I thought my blackout days were over—evidently not.

“Miss?” the voice came again and still I did not respond.

Was he an idiot, didn’t he know when he was being ignored? Thank God he didn’t have legs or he would have gotten himself out of his hospital bed, pulled a chair up beside me, and invited himself into my world. I pinched my wrists hard at that last callous thought.

“Miss?” He wasn’t going to stop.

“I’m not speaking to you,” I replied, hoping that would shut him up and it did.

He grumbled something and I heard the drawer to his nightstand open and close. Staticky music filled the room and then dropped to a low hum before anyone could complain. He had turned to his small transistor radio for company, leaving Hy-Lo and me alone again.

Hy-Lo looked the same. Time was not being kind to him.

I sat parallel to his toes, even though something foreign inside urged me closer.

“No,” I whispered to the air and folded my arms across my chest.

How much longer, how many more days before the bobbing green and red lights that monitored his heart finally went long and even? I wondered.

I peered out the window and waited for some long-ago offense Hy-Lo had committed against me to rise up and fill me with anger. But none came and I nodded on and off until Nurse D. Green came in to check his stats and change his intravenous bags. When she smiled, I smiled back and it was genuine because my sleep, for the first time in years, had been clean and clear of Hy-Lo.

I left him early that day; something pushed me out into the winter air. Some kind of feeling resembling joy took my hand and pulled me out into the cold bright day.

I was suspect of that light airy emotion. Joy. Wouldn’t trust it completely if Jesus Himself wrapped it up in shiny paper with red bows and presented it to me on my wedding day. It was as foreign to me as France.

I chastised myself as I walked the length of the block toward the bus stop. The wind was picking up, swirling lost newspapers and candy wrappers around my feet. I whistled to myself for company as I waited for my bus to arrive and smiled at the strangers who looked on me with anxious eyes. I boarded the first of two buses that would take me home. It was just after three and they were filled with rowdy children. I transferred buses and took the only seat available, between a woman who smelled like curried chicken and a man who smelled like a distillery. I held my breath as the bus snaked its way around the double-parked cars and delivery trucks that clogged Pitkin Avenue.

My stop was coming up and a woman I recognized as a former neighbor threw me a quick glance before abruptly standing up and hurrying toward the opening doors. I don’t know what possessed me to call out her name; maybe it was because she’d pretended not to see me or to know me, or maybe it was because she wore that green and white sheer polka-dot scarf like it was April instead of December. She knew it was an April scarf, she knew it because the last time I saw her it was April and I was grieving instead of rejoicing in the spring.