Stateway's Garden Page 12

  After he left I ran outside to follow him, struggling with the heavy door I barely could open anyway.

  “Jacob, where you going?”

  “I’m a man, I want to be left alone.”

  “Stay here, though.”

  “I’m gonna find me a way outta the projects for good, away from her, I promise you that, li’l bro.” He’d inherited the speech pattern from Mother.

  No sooner than I’d absorbed the swift syllables of his sentence, he disappeared down the hall and into the stairs. I’d seen him no more than five or six times since.

  “Are you listening to me? Hello?” Mother snapped her fingers loudly in front of my eyes like they were ears. “Tracy, are you listening to me? I asked you have you seen or talked to your brother?”

  “No.”

  “Not once?”

  “Just that last time before we moved. I told you about that one.”

  “Did he say he was coming home to our new house?”

  “Said he had his own home.”

  “Oh.” Mother would then stand, as if the late-for-work-stop-this-conversation-before-your-feelings-get-hurt alarm was ringing, and drink the remainder of her juice with slight pulp. “Okay, then,” she said while taking a long look at me. “Clean the table before you leave and don’t be late for the school bus. You know they’ll leave you.” She then kissed me on the cheek twice, leaving lipstick prints. “See you tonight.”

  I think I’d been kissed by my mother more times in the first two months of our living in the suburbs than ever as a boy. She looked me in the face as we talked, rather than at dirt under her fingernails or a book or the newspaper for jobs; there were no more middle-aged and married men standing naked and perusing our refrigerator in the middle of the night, searching for liquor and food we didn’t have; she came home at decent hours, cleaned routinely, checked homework, and cooked like chefs on shows from Channel 11’s programming. Mother arrived home from her job as a secretary each afternoon at about four, and left immediately after cooking and checking on me to work a second job she never spoke of. The job required stylish clothing. When she came in at night, normally around eleven or twelve, she’d assume I was sleeping. Our rooms were next to each other and were so close that any slight noises could be heard, even with the doors closed. I’d open my eyes a bit when she peeked in at night, never letting on to the fact that I’d been waiting for her the entire time.

  “You asleep, Tracy?” she’d say after locking the front door. Then the door to my room would creak, and she’d gently whisper again, “You sleeping?”

  Mother didn’t even take her fancy clothing off before I heard her fall onto the bed. Although she wasn’t what would be considered heavy, she’d gained some, and when she allowed her body to be absorbed by the mattress during weeknights, it sounded weighty enough to send the entire thing through to the basement. I’d patiently wait thirty to forty minutes—enough time that I could hear her snoring a little—and lift from the bed as quietly as possible.

  Navigating our new house in the burbs was incredibly easy, even in the pitch-black of night. When you walked into the house, there was the square and dull space Mother called her “future furniture room.” It was totally empty and no wider than the roach-filled kitchen from the projects where she never cooked. Once you passed there, our rooms were on the left, complete with wooden doors that couldn’t close properly because the hinges had been bent in a few directions. There was a bathroom just past that; the door to the basement was on the right, and in the daytime, considering there weren’t but two chairs and one table in the open area of the house (which were both in the kitchen), you could see from the front to the back of the place from either end.

  On those nights I’d head to the back, tiptoeing as though that stopped the dull hardwood floor from revealing my whereabouts, and stand in the kitchen window staring out at the alley. This was the part of our home—of our new neighborhood, for that matter—that made me terribly miss being back in the projects.

  The poles in the alleys holding power lines were made of wood. They looked like lengthy trees reaching out to touch one another. Seeing a rodent of any kind rummaging through trash in suburb alleys was like spotting a giraffe on Forty-Seventh and Halsted. There were gates that enclosed yards with spuds of grass that certainly grew tall in summer, and in the back of each home was a plastic dumpster for trash. These actually had lids and most of them weren’t overflowing. Each night I thought about sneaking out into the alley and running into garbage cans like linemen into halfbacks. The spilled debris would have made my view much more familiar.

  But Jacob helped my homesickness instead. When he strolled down that suburb alley, walking leisurely to our house, he resembled what Aquaman would have had he been biracial. His skin was glistening and his hair had grown again and was long, a purplish black, curlier than ever. At times it looked unmanageable, but by the way it bounced in the wind, they could have used the hair and his pretty face for a Pert Plus commercial. I could see him clearly in the dark as he walked up the stairs to the back porch like he was the person paying the mortgage. The radiant paint of the stairs seemed to absorb his legs and everything else as he approached, changing his pants and shirt and skin various colors of spring, even though we were in the early stages of winter. Jacob weighed what looked like a hundred and eighty pounds and seemed to have grown taller than six feet, but his size didn’t make the old wood of the porch creak in the least. Ironically, as short and skinny as I was, each afternoon when I emptied the garbage it sounded as if my weight would collapse the porch beneath me.

  “What’s up, li’l brother?” he mouthed through the screen door. In the cold, his small lips resembled a cherry. I rubbed my eyes as I stood at the door, looking out at him like he was inhuman. I had to have been dreaming as I watched Jacob smile and pat his feet from side to side to keep the blood circulating. “You gonna let me in or what?”

  He never really came through the back door. There were two gold-colored deadbolt locks that needed a key to open from the inside and outside, and a chain too high for me to reach. Opening the door would’ve been a mistake anyway. The thing sounded like it was made of prison metal when opening and Mother would’ve awakened and been standing alongside me in seconds. To the right of the door was a large window that collected enough dust to let me know it hadn’t been opened much before we moved there.

  I turned the metal locks at the top of the window, slowly, hoping the separating rust wouldn’t alert Mother. When I got it open, Jacob would be standing directly on the other side, hair blowing in wind like he was preparing for a scene in a movie, and smiling warmly back at me.

  “I missed you, li’l bro,” he’d say before positioning his hands inside the ledge. He had a large Eddie Bauer bookbag over his shoulders but hadn’t been inside a school since he was fourteen or fifteen. He moved from one side of the window to the other as though he had the exoskeleton of a spider. Wasn’t even breathing hard once his feet landed on the kitchen floor. Each time he came to visit he seemed taller, much taller, better-looking, muscles popping in places they shouldn’t have. “How you been?” he whispered.

  “Fine.”

  “You need any money?”

  “Nah.”

  “How’s Mom?”

  “Sleep.”

  “She been home long?”

  “Since about twelve-thirty.”

  “I made good timing, then.”

  “Yep. How you get here?”

  “I flew.”

  “Come on.” I pursed my mouth when I said it.

  “Took the train.”

  My brother would hug me, squeezing so hard that my back would crack. Surely I was dreaming, ’cause he never ever touched me when we lived in the projects, didn’t even speak in sentences slow enough that I could decipher. But when he’d come to visit, standing long and tall in the kitchen, he’
d relay some feel-good or nostalgic or even tragic story that made me miss Stateway more, a story that made me think I should miss home.

  “Remember Stacy?” he’d say.

  I’d shake my head no just so I could hear the story.

  “You remember Stacy, brown-skinned Stacy with the nice body!”

  Of course I remembered her. I’d had a crush on that girl since the second grade. I remained quiet, which urged my brother on.

  “She was shot the other day, li’l bro. She died.”

  “How?”

  “Silly gang stuff. Stray bullets.”

  My eyes opened wide.

  That would be the beginning of our night together. Jacob would yank the refrigerator open, ignoring the loud squeaking sound the icebox made because it stood on three metal stumps. The other had been replaced with a large piece of cardboard in an attempt to achieve some sort of balance. He grabbed leftovers from whatever Mother had made and set them on the table.

  “Warm me up a plate of this, I haven’t tasted home-cooked food in over a week,” he said.

  “What do you eat, then?” I asked.

  “Pizza puffs, gyros with extra cucumbers, burgers with mustard, sometimes hot dogs. Lots and lots of fries and mild sauce.”

  What a menu. In my mind Jacob was living the good life. He had shiny gold bracelets that made the locks on the door resemble dull plastic, and his stiff new clothes made me think Mother was starching them each morning before she went to work.

  “Mom made this?” he asked.

  “She does all the cooking now. The healthy stuff, from what she says.”

  “When you get older, something close to my age, you gonna realize that’s a good thing.”

  I’d make myself a plate as well and we would sit there eating, glancing and smiling at each other every so often. Felt like another date.

  “And you’re not that old, anyway,” I replied after a while.

  “I’m a long way from you, longer than you know.”

  After we ate, Jacob would stand, exhale, and do the old-man, pat-the-belly move. His stomach was flatter than Mother’s ironing board.

  “Put the dishes away after you clean them, don’t add extra work for Mom to do,” he ordered.

  I nodded because he sounded just like her. But by the time I’d finished washing and drying dishes, wiping the table, and making sure to position the plates where Mother instructed during chore time, Jacob had already taken his usual tour of the house and would be sitting on the floor in my bedroom.

  “Still no furniture?” he asked.

  “Nah. Not yet.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Mother says she hasn’t saved enough to get the kind of leather stuff she wants.”

  “Maybe I should buy it for her, wouldn’t take me long at all.”

  “Where would I say it came from?”

  “Me, dummy.”

  “She wouldn’t take it.”

  “Yeah, you probably right.”

  “It’s not like she’d allow anyone to sit on it anyway. We kept the plastic on the cheap furniture her last boyfriend bought for four years.”

  We both smiled and began to relax. At that time, there was little furniture in my room: I used three crates as a dresser, placing underwear in the orange one, jeans in the white crate, socks and T-shirts in the gray one, and the last, a fourth, which was a black milk-model from some dairy farm, was used as the dirty-clothes hamper. The TV from my room in the projects was thirteen inches of black-and-white, a Sylvania, and it filled the corner of the new room easily. With precise positioning, taking the fork used as an antenna and leaning it to the right, it resembled those televisions in hospitals that were propped above patients’ beds. I made certain it faced out toward us on the floor.

  “Turn the thing on,” Jacob would say. “Find something funny ’cause I need to laugh, keep the volume low.”

  He and I would sit there nearly an hour snickering like girls at episodes of The Jeffersons and Good Times and Three’s Company.

  “You should move back with us,” I said to my brother. “Plenty of room in this big house.”

  Jacob didn’t look at me when I said that. He just unzipped the bookbag, which I hadn’t noticed he’d brought into the bedroom, and began pulling out items. I saw a toothbrush, a comb I’m sure he had no use for, a mirror, and a pair of clean white T-shirts. Last was a six-pack of some overseas bottled beer whose name required so many letters it had to have been terribly expensive.

  “This is for you,” he said, handing the beer to me. “Crack open a couple while we watch TV, you’ll like these.”

  “Jacob, you don’t drink. You never drink.”

  “I do when I’m with you.”

  I took two bottles to the kitchen and reached into the cabinet for the most sophisticated-looking glasses there were. The bottles of beer were slightly warm but Jacob and I didn’t mind. I tiptoed toward the bedroom, peeking in at Mother to make certain of her sleep. Her snoring sounded like that of a forklift driver. When I arrived in the bedroom, my brother had made himself very comfortable. He was sitting on the floor, back resting against the wall next to the window and staring at the ceiling.

  “Maybe I should come home and see you guys more, be around my family,” he said.

  I didn’t know how to reply. Instead, I opened a bottle of beer for him, admiring the fact that the beer sounded like Niagara Falls as it landed in the glass. I tossed the tops onto the floor.

  “You think you’d want to live here?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied while pursing his lips. He looked just like pictures of Mother when she was younger.

  We both put our feet on the bed. There was no frame, or even a box spring, so we didn’t have to lift our legs much.

  “I wish I could have done what you did,” I said after about four gulps of beer. “You’re a real man.”

  Jacob shook his head and took another drink. I noticed small dribbles of beer remaining on his bottom lip and the shows playing in the background no longer contained their humor. We took a glance every five minutes or so at the TV screen, hoping for something that would break our extended silence.

  “Tracy?” my mother called from the other room. Her voice sounded like she had been drinking dish liquid. “Tracy, do you hear me?”

  “Yes, Mother.” I placed the glass on the side, hoping she wouldn’t move any farther.

  “Turn the television off. Go to sleep.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Jacob moved the four feet to the television and barely lowered the volume. Two minutes later we heard our mother snoring once again. We remained silent awhile, continuing to glance at the screen and drink warm beers.

  “You should be proud of yourself, Jacob. At least you still get to live in the old neighborhood. You’re in the projects, where we belong.”

  “You sound as young as you are.”

  “Everyone belongs somewhere.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Well, I miss it there. I wish we could take this big house right back to the South Side. Show everybody how well our mother is doing now.”

  “You don’t understand, li’l bro.”

  “All I know is it’s boring here. No people outside. Nothing’s the same. Nothing to do.”

  “And what’s so bad about that?”

  “Even the kids at the school are different.”

  “That’s what suburb life is about.”

  “I think it’s too quiet.”

  Jacob pursed his mouth again and looked directly at me. He crossed his legs one over the other on the bed. They were so long they nearly reached all the way across the bed to the wall’s edge. He began taking quick gulps of beer, similar to Mother and her juice. Looked like he was taking doses of cough medicine. When it was done he opened an
other without hesitating. Was the first time with me that he had ever opened his own beer. Another top flew in the direction of the others on the floor.

  “She’s pregnant,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  “I thought you said you were done with her? That you had too many other girls that wanted you.”

  “I was, I did, I do.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “She got pregnant, I asked her not to have it.” He took another heavy drink.

  “What she say then?”

  “No way.”

  “You should tell Mother.”

  “Can’t tell her, can’t.”

  Jacob finished the remainder of what I believe was his fourth beer by that time, opening another before he had swallowed. He leaned his body into the corner, nearly fitting himself into the space between the crates and closet. The dark shadows of the room began blending with him, fusing with the warm brown and label-blanketed bottle he held in his left hand. They absorbed him completely, pulling him into the safe spot of our suburb house that should have been his anyway.

  He looked at his wrist but there was no watch. “I think you should get some sleep for school tomorrow, you gotta get up early,” he said, leaning in toward me. His face looked quite tired and he continued just fading and fading from my view, merging with the patterns of wallpaper.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  I moved to the mattress and began taking off my socks. Then I reached back to the floor, grabbing the beer and finishing the last few gulps.

  “This is the last time we’re gonna drink, li’l bro.”

  I didn’t even argue because he always said that kind of thing each time he was about to leave. He took the empty bottles and shoved them into his bag, and repeatedly yanked at the stuck zipper once the bag was filled.