Stateway's Garden Page 20

  “He’s not so little anymore, Stephanie.”

  “Really?”

  “They do plenty of push-ups in the Marines.”

  “That’s kinda sexy.”

  “Yeah, sure it is.”

  “Stop being like that, Jacob.”

  “He wanted to know if you’re still pretty. How silly.”

  “Awwww. Where’s he now?”

  “They got him stationed in Texas.”

  “He was always so smart. I’m proud of him.”

  “I guess so. But don’t you worry, everybody tells him.”

  “You shouldn’t be so jealous of your own brother, Jacob.”

  “Whatever. He’s all right. So, how was the job in Miami?”

  “It was another job.”

  “Oh. You been back by Thirty-fifth? Or on State? You see they started tearing the buildings down, right?”

  “About time.”

  “Yours is already gone.”

  “I won’t miss it.”

  “How’s your sister?”

  “Moved to Iowa a couple months ago.”

  I ran out of small things to say. “Give me a kiss, Stephanie. Please.”

  “Later.”

  “A hug?”

  “I don’t want to be touched right now.”

  She placed her wiry fingers around the glass, elegantly, and without lifting her head much placed it to her lips. I continued wondering if she even drank anything or how she got the liquid to go down without it spilling on the white blouse. I was normally under the impression that white wasn’t to be worn during the cold month of March, but Steph had her own fashion rules. After she sipped again, I could see her lips.

  “Steph, you ever think of what our baby would’ve looked like?”

  “I wasn’t pregnant, Jacob.”

  “But still, don’t you ever wonder?”

  “I try not to.”

  She lifted her head a bit. The wetness from the liquor made me want to kiss her even more. Liquor was the lip gloss that made a man stay faithful. A lot of the time I thought to reach out and grab her hand. Maybe even comfort her.

  My wife likes that kind of thing. At least before she left the first time, she did.

  * * *

  ONE DAY, IN NOVEMBER, a little over four months ago, my wife secretly followed me from work as I drove to the airport to pick Steph up. She was only going to be in town for a day and a half and I just had to see her. I certainly could justify one day away from home or explain why I’d spent the night at the office. It was closing-the-books time, or I had some new client to visit late. The lie should’ve worked. But my wife is a smart woman. She’s the person who taught me how to speak clearly and slowly, taught me the importance of reading, of learning words, and of eventually getting an associate’s degree. Those things are what attracted me to her then. They were different from anything I knew, but they put me right to sleep now. I remember thinking that she was everything a man who feels like he’s living a life not meant for him doesn’t want, and doesn’t want to be reminded of either: She’s short, wears glasses to read things that aren’t serious, is chubbier than a penguin, articulate, neat, trusting, honest, to the point, safe, never does any drugs or drinks anything worse than cough syrup, makes no noise when we make love, and always drives with both hands on the steering wheel. She has never really wanted to go out, sits on the couch waiting for me after cooking dinner, and watches TV sparsely.

  And I was stupid enough to leave my wallet with the “somewhat respectable” bar receipts in it, right next to the television, after going to sleep before her one night.

  When Steph and I came from the airport, we went straight to the bar. Our normal motions: Me to the bar for drinks, her to the bathroom for early “drinks” and a tippy-toed pee with her head drooped. For some odd reason, I sat on the side of the booth with my back to the door. Steph’s head was down and she was doing the thing with her wrist and nose. My wife walked in, I’m sure wiping fog from her glasses and coughing from smoke, and simply scanned the room. There I was in the corner. I should have heard her footsteps as she approached. My wife didn’t tap me on the shoulder or whisper something vicious into my ear. She yelled my name like she wished her voice was a trumpet.

  “Jake!”

  I always hated when she called me that bull. Sounded so whitefolkish. No one in the bar even budged after she yelled my name. I didn’t want to turn my head, especially since I was trying to focus on Steph. But, I did. Her small, fat-fingered fist landed against my jaw with the authority of a fifth-grade boy: off target but point taken. I stood and stared at her a second. Her dark skin was glistening from sweat, though it had to have been only fifteen or so degrees outside. If she had worn my favorite lip gloss I’d have left with her right then, right freaking then, ready to listen to every single word said. My wife’s mouth was as dry as Chicago winter air, though, flakes of dead skin just floating everywhere. I stared back at Steph for a reaction, for something that meant she had feelings. As usual, her face was planted in her hands, head moving back and forth then side to side. By the time I turned around, my wife was almost out the door.

  I ran after her, tripping over the leg of a table in the process. I couldn’t run fast, and most times, I rested my weight on my right leg because my left knee was destroyed in a water accident. It made me look a lot shorter, leaning on one leg like that. When I walked, the limp was terrible, awkward and stiff, like the leg was frozen.

  I tried to catch my wife, but I quickly lost my breath. By that point in life, exercising was not high on my list of priorities, and the bulge in my stomach showed that. But I moved as fast as possible for a man with a left kneecap made of steel.

  * * *

  STEPH AND I were eighteen when the accident with my knee occurred. We were supposed to be driving from Chicago to Indianapolis for the first time. Her birthday was coming up, and it was my surprise to her. She had a thing for wanting to leave Chicago, to go somewhere she thought was far away. My uncle from Englewood helped me rent this two-door sports car: black with silver chrome, with some unpronounceable German name, a nice disc player with the cassette deck too, and a six-speaker surround system. I was truly excited. Until I told Steph. Then I was something more than excited.

  Back then, she was a different person: clear-eyed, hopeful, maybe even optimistic. She smiled and laughed a lot, bought little bracelets she found at the malls on Forty-third and King Drive, and gave kisses I didn’t have to ask for. Stuffy Stephanie Worthington.

  She actually thought I’d rented this flashy car just so we could go to Great America for the weekend. In fact, that’s what I told my uncle. He was so proud of my 3.8 GPA. I lied about that I think he would have rented me a Porsche.

  I went to Steph’s building to pick her up and made sure to park the car around the corner. I knocked on the door quickly. Her sister, Solane, answered.

  “Hey, Jacob,” she said. “Stephie’s in the back…Stephieeeeeee!” She yelled it into my face then turned into the apartment. I could hear the kids playing in the background. “Stephieeeeeee, Jacob is here!” She then turned back to me. “You wanna come in?”

  “Nah, guess I’ll wait out here.”

  “Okay, I’m about to close the door…flies out there.” She turned and the door latched. I heard her again at a lower volume. “Ste-pha-nieeeeeee, Jacob’s waiting out on the ramp!”

  Their porch was the most decorated you could find in the building. It would be swamped in clothing: blue dresses with lace on the arms, green panties hanging about that were definitely too big for Steph, orange tops with phrases like “I’m a diva,” and “I got yo’ man,” and “I’m all woman,” spread across them, followed with blackish bras in that same large, non-matching-Steph size. The clothes were good to hide in, especially if the wind wasn’t blowing, because we spent quite a few nights folded in t
hem kissing and me fingering.

  The door reopened and she stepped out without speaking, looking me directly in the eye. At that time I was good to look at. My skin was a very light brown, a rare color never found in the loveliest kaleidoscope, and Steph told me often that I looked as though I had crystallized sand particles sprinkled around my eyes. I had all my hair, my teeth were mostly white, and at eighteen people mistook me for a bit older. Now I’m something close to overweight from eating corn chips with my wife at midnight, eyes a flammable red from work stress and drinking to relieve it; I began losing my hair about a year ago and I unconsciously lean to the side like the cheap table I tripped over running out of the bar.

  Thinking about such a drastic transformation, a fat person’s pizza-transformation if you will, I can understand maybe why Steph was more affectionate with me then. The goal always was to impress her because I believed she was somewhat out of my league, even then, especially now.

  And I owed her. I owed what we were from.

  * * *

  —

  AS WE STOOD on the ramp that night, I think I can honestly say that was the last time I got a clear look at Steph. She had her hair shortened then, eyelashes freshly flipped and darkened, and her arms were toned from hallway pull-ups. She said the world of opportunity would be more welcoming if her body was in perfect shape.

  “What you doing here so early?” she asked while wrapping her arms around my neck.

  “I got a surprise for you.”

  “You already told me the other day we’re going to Great America.”

  “I got something more, something way better than that, you gotta see it.”

  “Slow down, honey. You’re talking too fast.”

  “I do have something new, though.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It’s your birthday, right?” I lifted my eyebrows after saying that.

  “You know my birthday’s tomorrow.”

  “You packed yet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go pack some stuff for a few extra days, you gonna need it.”

  “We staying longer?”

  “I think when we get where we’re going, you’ll want to stay a long time.”

  Steph ran back into the apartment and returned with a small suitcase. She handed it to me and I turned to look off the porch.

  “Where’s the car?” she asked. “I thought you were renting a car for us.”

  “It’s…” I began to point.

  “Your uncle didn’t change his mind, did he?”

  Before I continued with another word, I grabbed Steph by the hand, almost yanking her down the stairs of her building. We didn’t consider waiting for the probably broken elevator. As we went down, her arm jerked against mine a few times. I know I was imagining it, but I felt she was trying to pull away and head back up the stairs. And looking at it now, that would have been the best decision she could have made. However, her high heels continued clicking on the concrete right behind me. I glanced back at Steph, eventually staring at her with a smug grin. She dressed sharply that night: bright purple skirt that came just above her knees, a sleeveless top that was some shiny color between gray and white. The outfit had to have been picked especially for me.

  We told her aunt Renee we were going to drive up to the amusement park in the morning, but would be hanging out with some friends at one of their places that night. It was around graduation time. We were from the projects. No one bothered to check.

  But Steph and I planned on going to a motel.

  People probably suspected, hell, they surely knew, but we had gotten into little trouble before, Steph especially, and they must’ve just decided to trust us. Even I was surprised when my uncle said yes about the car. He told me I had this edge to my personality that was simply begging for big money and chaos, that I should’ve been his son, been just like him.

  In front of Steph’s building a few of the streetlights had been knocked out, but because of the brightness of her outfit, she was still shining.

  “Where we going, Jacob?” The impatience of Stuffy was sometimes overwhelming.

  “Right here, right here to the corner.”

  “It’s a little dark to be playing around here. Not safe.”

  “I’m the dude around these projects, you know that.”

  Standing there looking at Steph in her gleaming outfit made me happy. She was the most attractive girl from our buildings and had a big future—we had a big future, together. The projects never seemed to be enough for her. The buildings were dry and marked up, and everywhere she saw and mentioned the unimportant names of different dealers and dummies and other people that Stephanie said didn’t want anything worthwhile. She said they only wanted to use their energy to brand the territory in sprayed colors of brown and red and blue and yellow, all of which were easily visible in the dark of night. It was quiet that night, though. No TVs, yells, horns, and the crime rate seemed to have dropped dramatically. No one was standing outside. I think a kid could’ve left their ten-speed bike out and returned in the morning to find it, everything in place, a handwritten note of concern attached. And her aunt followed us out the door as we left, waiting that perfectly timed ten minutes until we were almost at the end of the block on State Street.

  Steph’s aunt Renee trusted me. She’d been good friends with my mom since they were kids. Said I was good for her niece, that I was a nice and pretty and stable boy. When I’d come to their apartment, she always wanted me to sit next to her. She even rubbed my chest a few times, which made me feel weird around her. One of the early times I came over for Steph, I wore a cheap necktie and some slacks and spoke like English teachers told me I should’ve. After that, she would look at me over those old-school eyeglasses, medium-dark skin and thick lips, with her head completely wrapped, and say, “Jacob, you’re going to be somebody one day. Somebody that people will want to know.” She then rubbed her hand along my chin. “You talk fast like a politician. You have potential.”

  It’s funny, I can describe Steph’s aunt Renee better than my own mother. All my mother ever said was not to be the man my father was. And don’t have no babies. As long as I lied about good grades, stayed away from hard drugs, and wasn’t another teenaged black boy with a baby I couldn’t take care of, she was totally fine. Steph’s aunt asked me questions about my life and was the one who had grown-up talks with me. Around her, I wasn’t nervous, although I’d been sleeping with her niece for almost three years by then.

  “Jacob, I can trust you with our baby girl,” she’d say in a voice soaked in Wild Irish Rose. That’s how I was able to pull off the whole phony Great America-go-to-the-motel-go-to-Indianapolis-trip. My mother didn’t care. Steph’s aunt cared too much. We had it made.

  When we hit the corner of her block, Steph’s bag in my hand, I heard the impatience of her sighs. She looked around the buildings, eyes circling the entire housing-project complex, scanning the corners and whatever loose scenery might catch attention.

  “What’d you walk me down here for, Jacob? I’m tired of looking at this place. I thought we were getting on the road.”

  “Look there.” I pointed, my palms sweaty. “This what we riding in!”

  She fixed her eyes on the car as if it hadn’t been sitting there all along. Odd how when people gain access to things, things out of reach before, everything they touch from that point appears special. Cars like our black one sat around the Stateway buildings all the time, owned by dealers tripling my best days, but at that time, she never even gave them a second thought. The chrome panel over the wheels was brightly buffed and I made certain to wash the windows before driving it.

  “We’re going in this?” she asked.

  I nodded and smiled.

  I then drove the car as though it’d belonged to me the previous five years, adapting quickly to the orange lighting of t
he dash, the black leather gearshift, the nice stereo. Steph was on my right, in her skirt, legs shining like car chrome from baby oil and moonlight.

  “I got a couple more surprises for you,” I said once we hit Interstate 94.

  Steph didn’t even notice I’d spoken. She didn’t even realize we were heading in the opposite direction we were supposed to. Then again, I was always talking fast anyways. She was one of those teenaged girls whose mouths were automatic as well, plugged into something needing rechargeable batteries, especially when gossiping or detailing a plan on leaving Stateway. But she kept her left hand glued to the inside of my right thigh that night. I actually did picture that was going to be our life from then on: riding freely in summer heat, touching each other, windows down, wind blowing, me talking, Steph not listening.

  “Let’s spend tonight in the motel,” I said swiftly. She began talking about new photos she had taken, poses practiced over the past days, her skin tone, cities we could eventually move to, and her aunt telling her how proud she was. Steph was so charged up that she threw in an I love you, Jacob, every eight minutes or so as though it belonged in the mix.

  “Yes, let’s spend tonight at the motel,” she answered at least twenty minutes after I’d made the suggestion. Her hand moved farther up my leg. Stephanie had touched me before, touched me in much worse places when we rolled ourselves in the clothes hanging from her porch, but that night her hand gripped the inside of my leg with this tense amount of force, nothing painful, yet it got every bit of my attention. She didn’t look at me as she spoke; her words slowed and released from her mouth with precision. “I want to do something different tonight,” she continued. “I really really do.” Her hand eased from my thigh and rested just below my rib cage.

  “You sure you’re okay with going tonight. Are you sure?” I asked.

  She nodded her head slightly. Without turning I saw the movement easily.

  “Just pick somewhere,” she said. “I want to be alone with you.”