Hold Love Strong

T
he first pain came at noon but she didn't tell anybody about it. My mother was thirteen and she went about the afternoon being every part of such a precarious age. She watched TV. She popped pimples and studied her face in the bathroom mirror. She listened to the radio, sang along with songs, and laughed along with the afternoon DJs. She wrote in her diary.
I still can't Beleve! I'm pregnant,
she scribbled in bulbous letters that began and ended in curls.
I can't beleve my belly is soooo big!
At five, she took a nap and awoke three hours later, home alone and in a wet bed. She thought it was pee, balled the sheets, put them in the trash, and told herself she was disgusting. Then it was midnight and the pain became a fiery Cinderella banging to flee her guts. Still, she ignored it. Twenty minutes later, another pain came like the previous one but angrier, and so along with the banging it tore at her, buckled her knees, and left her coiled and crying on the floor. She had to do something. She had to find an answer; or something to distract her from the increasing fre
quency of such mercilessness; or some kind of pliers to rip and wrench the pain out of her. She went to her best friend Cherrie's apartment one floor below ours. It was a Friday night and she knew Cherrie would be awake watching TV.

“It's just gas,” Cherrie decided, pouring my mother a glass of ginger ale in the kitchen. “What you eat?”

“Some Ring Dings and a bag of Doritos,” said my mother.

“A whole bag, damn!” Cherrie forced her surprise to fit into a whisper because her mother was asleep in one room, her big sister Candy was asleep in the other, and the walls in the apartment, like the walls in every Ever Park Project apartment, amplified even the slightest sound.

Although Cherrie had a way of convincing my mother that what was major was minor, and although my mother hoped that what was going on inside her was something trivial and unholy, she was still just thirteen, so she was scared, maybe even desperate.

“Should I call James?” she asked.

The year was 1982. There were no cell phones or pagers so there was no way to get in touch with people unless you knew where they were or left a message where they would soon arrive. My grandmother and my mother's sister, my Aunt Rhonda, would have been my mother's first and second choices, but they had taken my Uncle Roosevelt and my cousins Donnel and Eric to see
E.T.,
so there was no way of speaking to them, and calling where they would arrive meant calling where she had just left. As for James, he was my father. That is, James Llewelyn Arthur sowed the seed that became me. He was twenty. The last time my mother and he spoke they fought over a retractable Bic pen. He wanted it. She wouldn't give it to him. He punched her breast. She stabbed him in the leg with it. That was the previous week. Since then he was gone and never found; never found a phone; never found another pen and paper to write a letter; never found two twigs to rub together to make a small fire so a smoke signal would drift into the sky and prove he knew we were alive.

“James?” said Cherrie, wiping her mouth after swigging straight from the two-liter bottle of ginger ale. “What's he gonna do?”

Although the answer could only be nothing, my mother used Cherrie's phone to call James. Of course, there was no James to speak to. He was out said his grandmother, an old woman with a wobbly, frayed voice who was too lonely to even wonder, let alone ask, why my mother was calling so late. “You know,” she said, “come to think, I ain't seen him since yesterday. I hope he comes home tonight.”

“Tell him Angela called,” blurted my mother.

“Who?”

“Angela.”

“OK, Angela, that's such a pretty name. I once had a dear friend named Anita. That's a pretty name too.”

“Tell him I need to see him, that it's real, real important. Tell him to call as soon as he comes in. It don't matter what time it is.”

“He has your phone number?”

“Yeah,” my mother answered, trying to sound confident yet wondering if he remembered it.

Because my mother hadn't left a note nor trace of where she went and why she left, she and Cherrie ascended the stairs from the third floor to the fourth floor and returned to my grandma's apartment. There, they sat on the plaid, mustard-colored couch and watched TV as if late night reruns of the Three Stooges could refute my mother's pregnancy and pains and transport them to who they should have been at this time in their lives, nascent teenage girls just beyond the loss of their last baby teeth, confidantes whose essential aims had yet to be developed and so needed to be discussed in that mighty gabbing and giggling best thirteen-year-old girlfriends do when awake after midnight.

Just as suddenly as each pain before, another crash tried to split my mother in half. She slammed herself into the back of the couch, and breathed so hard and fast snot flew from her nose.

“What's it feel like?” asked Cherrie, touching my mother's round belly with both hands.

“God damn, fuck!” said my mother, sweating and shaking her head no. “It's like I got lightning inside me.”

When the pain dissipated, Cherrie got my mother a glass of water from the kitchen. Then there was the sound of keys opening the door, a click and clack and then two clacks more. Locks were being unlocked. Someone was about to be home.

“Ma!” my mother shouted as if she had fallen down a dark hole and feared she would never be found. “Momma!”

But it wasn't my grandma. The door opened and my Aunt Rhonda walked in holding Eric in her arms, his legs dangling around her waist as he slept with his head burrowed in the crook of her neck. Eric was two and he was afflicted with a particular idiosyncrasy that made him somewhat of a spectacle. He was born with Sjögren's syndrome so he could howl and shout, and he could screech and scream until every vein in his head seemed as if it might explode, but he could not cry. Never. Not once had there ever been nor would there ever be a tear in or falling from his eyes.

“Sorry we so late,” my Aunt Rhonda said, taking her keys out of the door so not yet looking at my mother. “The first movie was sold out, so we had to see the later one.”

My Aunt Rhonda was seventeen. She was five foot three inches tall, one hundred and ten peanut-butter-brown pounds of a young woman, and the extreme of the lesson my mother was learning. That is, she only knew loving herself through seeking, finding, and being hurt by men who did not love themselves nor comprehend the value of being someone cherished. She said hello to Cherrie. Then she looked at my mother and her eyes got stuck.

“Jelly, what's wrong?” she asked, calling my mother by the nickname she had given her when she was a little girl.

“She got gas,” said Cherrie. “I made her drink some ginger ale. She'll be all right soon.”

“See,” my Aunt Rhonda scolded. “I told you to stop fucking with all that junk food.”

Through the open door my Uncle Roosevelt strode into the apartment, dragging my Aunt Rhonda's eldest son, my cousin, weary-eyed, half-asleep four-year-old Donnel by the hand behind him.

“Damn, Jelly,” Roosevelt said. “Why you look so crazy?”

My Uncle Roosevelt was an amber-skinned, narrow-eyed, gangly nine-year-old who already owned the kingly disposition only the world's most blessed men approach possessing. His grace was astounding. No season, situation; no rage, pain, or suffering touched him. He let go of Donnel's hand, crossed in front of my Aunt Rhonda, and came to the couch.

“How's the baby?” he asked.

“Where's Ma?” my mother said.

“She's coming,” my Aunt Rhonda answered. “She got stuck talking to Mr. Goines outside.”

“He loves her,” added my Uncle Roosevelt, stating what everyone knew to be truth.

He leaned over my mother and put his ear against her belly. Suddenly my mother winced and moaned and was racked with a wave of pain that made her nostrils flare, lips quiver, and her body shudder as if her ribs were pounding her organs to pieces. My Aunt Rhonda ran to her, seamlessly handing Eric to my Uncle Roosevelt, who cocked his hip, set Eric upon it, and tucked the boy's head beneath his chin without waking him.

“Jelly,” said Rhonda wiping the sweat from my mother's forehead with her hand. “Jelly, your water break?”

“I don't know,” my mother moaned. “It just hurts.”

When the contraction ended my Aunt Rhonda told Cherrie to call an ambulance.

“No,” said my mother.

“What you mean, ‘No'?” my Aunt Rhonda asked. She stood tall, planted her hands on her hips, and looked down at my mother. “We got to get you to the hospital.”

“James is gonna call,” said my mother.

My Aunt Rhonda sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes as if making a red circle around an incorrect answer in the air. “Jelly, you about to burst!” she scolded. “We don't got time for James.”

“I got time,” said my mother.

My father was not the type of man who gave a damn or sacrificed in the name of what was necessary, just, and good. My mother was impulsive and headstrong. We were going to be a family is all she believed. That's it, that seventh-grade cusp of pubescent confusion, that dream trumped all truth. That conviction was her head and heart and the construction of her vital organs. James would come around. He would realize it was only a pen and she didn't mean to stab him. It was only a matter of time. They would raise me together. She paid no mind to my Aunt Rhonda's history, the other young histories pushing strollers in the neighborhood, nor what anyone warned her. James Llewelyn Arthur loved her infinity. That's what he told her just before the first times but never after, just before she gave him her virginity, just before the first time she gave him head, just before she let him go down on her, bury his lips, lick, lap, and spread the one part of her body she had never studied in the mirror nor had the courage to touch herself.

My grandma came into the apartment. “What are you all crazy or something?” she scolded. “Why is this door open?”

“Ma,” my mother whimpered.

My grandma didn't speak. She didn't blink or breathe. A passionately constructed woman of only thirty, she swiftly studied the scene. She looked at my mother. She looked at Cherrie. She looked at Rhonda. All of my grandma's features possessed a depth and delicacy that made
her and everything within ten feet of her beautiful. Her body and being were balance. Her arms were long and muscular as were her legs, fingers, neck, earlobes, and the length of time her laughter lasted.

“When was the last one?” she asked.

“Just before. Maybe not even two minutes,” said my Aunt Rhonda. She slammed her eyes on Cherrie. “What I tell you? Shit, what the fuck I say?”

Cherrie sprinted into the kitchen, where our phone sat on the counter, and my grandma and my Aunt Rhonda led my mother into the bathroom because the couch was my grandma's first and only couch and even though she bought it used she refused for it to be ruined or even slightly stained by anyone or anything, even birth, no matter how divine an occasion it was.

“Mind your nephews!” my grandma told Roosevelt.

“I got them,” he said, taking Donnel's hand, leading him and his wide eyes to sit on the couch, and then sitting beside him with Eric, still sleeping, balanced against him.

In the kitchen, Cherrie turned the rotary dial, held the phone to her ear, and listened. Nothing. She tapped the switch-hooks hoping that there was some kind of short, or that one of the buttons was stuck. Still, nothing. She slammed the phone into the cradle then picked it up and held it to her ear again. Nothing. She slammed the handset down.

“It's dead!” she cried out. There ain't even a dial tone!”

My grandma closed her eyes and cursed everything under her breath, Queens and the state of New York, the phone company and Ever Park, life, herself, America. The phone could have been dead for one of any number of reasons: the phone bill hadn't been paid; the phone company didn't do the proper upkeep; someone in our building cut a wire thinking splicing it would give them phone service.

“Go downstairs,” shouted my grandma. “Don't act like you ain't got
no sense! Use yours. And if that don't work go use a pay phone! Shit, Cherrie, don't just give up!”

Cherrie bolted out of our apartment like my grandma's voice was fire and the drum of Cherrie's heavy feet could be heard thumping down the stairs until she reached the third floor's door, which squealed when it opened then boomed when it closed.

In the bathroom, my grandma and my Aunt Rhonda helped my mother take off her clothes.

“My shirt too?” asked my mother.

“Shirt too,” ordered my grandma. “Unless you got the money to pay for a new one if it gets bloody.”

So off came my mother's shirt and for a moment my grandma, my aunt, and my mother just stood there, three proximate shades of black women, autumnal hues in a small, plain bathroom with white walls, a white porcelain sink, a white bathtub, and a white toilet with a broken black plastic seat. My grandma and my Aunt Rhonda looked at my mother, who, looking in the bathroom mirror, looked at herself as well. In addition to the disposition and body type of my grandma, my mother was the color of an old penny at the bottom of a wishing well. Equally, she reflected and absorbed sunshine, streetlights, and the hopes of those who wished upon her, then cast her off. Her eyes and lips, her nose, shoulders and breasts, even her thighs and hips were shaped like new leaves, full yet still timid, still approaching their eventual lustrous peak.

My grandma snatched the red bath towel from the back of the bathroom door and put it on the floor. “Here,” she decided. “Lay down on this. And Rhonda, get behind and hold her. That baby is coming. I can feel it. We ain't got much time.”

My mother lay down. The bathroom was so small her head crossed the threshold of its doorway. Behind my mother, on her knees, wrapping her arms around her and wedging her thighs against my mother's back, my Aunt Rhonda kneeled on the coarse, grey carpet of the
living room. My grandma stepped into the bathtub. She hiked her skirt up over her knees, squatted, and put my mother's ankles on her shoulders.