Life Is Funny (18 page)

*  *  *

Time is tricky. You have whole months, even years, when nothing changes a speck, when you don't go anywhere or do anything or think one new thought. And then you can get hit with a day, or an hour, or half a second, when so much happens it's almost like you got born all over again into some brand-new person you for damn sure never expected to meet.

Before the day Gingerbread first talked to me, I'd a long time forgotten about laughing, but the second after he said his own name right out loud, I remembered again. When we first started, I asked why he laughed so much, and he said, like it ought to be plain as day,
Because life is funny,
and maybe that's when I for real started to fall in love.

*  *  *

“I have to talk to you,” I tell Nick while Eva's out arguing with Workfare and Tory's at After School. Nick swings his legs up and out to fall over the side of his bed so he can sit. I stay at the doorway. One foot in, one foot out.

“You have to leave.” He chews his lower lip and eyeballs the floor. “Before my last day of school.” If he's out a few weeks before me, I can be pretty sure he'll be gone for good. “You can't come back.”

“Why now?” he asks.

“Why do you think?” I say.

“Was a long time ago.”

“I was nine the first time,” I remind him. “Tory's almost nine.” He looks up.

“I never touched Tory.”

“You never will.”

“Y'all are my sisters.”

“You can't come back.”

I've been expecting him to argue shit at me. I have a steak knife up in my sleeve. My hand is curled around the tip so it won't slip out.

I haven't thrown more than five words a week to him for years. I don't know what he does all day. I don't even know how old he is anymore. Twenty-three. Twenty-four, maybe. I know he's all into the
People's Court
on TV and Lucky Charms cereal. He wears hoodies. I don't think he messes with drugs. But looks-wise, he takes after our mama.

He apologized when I was twelve. He was crying. I don't like to remember that. I like to remember the time he spelled and defined “metamorphosis” when my mama was clean. He used her as an example, and he was chewing on the Popsicle stick left over from our lunch that day. When he smiled, his teeth were mad purple.

*  *  *

Aunt Eva gives me ice wrapped in old scarves and head massages when I get migraines. She sits up behind and leans me on her front and tries to make the drilling go away, and usually it doesn't work, but it's good anyway. She tells me stories about how my mama used to do the same for her when they were coming up. Migraines have always been in my family, along with too much using and streeting. But everybody says we each never get more than one bad tendency, so me and Aunt Eva are the lucky ones because headaches don't get you dirty or crazy or doing time or dead.

“I'm not going,” I tell her the night before the last day of school.

“Uh huh,” she says, rubbing hard.

“Gingerbread's parents said I can stay with them.”

“Do they know what the two of you do together?”

“It's not like that's all we ever do,” I go. “And you sound like a church lady.”

“Well, what am I supposed to say?”

“‘Do they know we're fucking.'”

“Keisha! That is worse than disgusting!” But her hands don't stop on my sore head.

*  *  *

We don't say good-bye in some bed, the way it would be if we were a movie. Instead Gingerbread's parents give me a baked chicken dinner and a leather-covered journal with my name in gold on the binding and a box of chocolates for the bus ride, and then they shoo us out.

We meet up with my best friend, Mara, and her man, DeShawn, at McDonald's. Mara gives me a new pair of sunglasses and a baseball hat, and after we chill for a while, they take off, and it's just me and 'Bread in the corner booth.

“Shiny eyes,” he whispers, tapping at my palms under the table. I lean out to kiss him and then grab his crazy bitty ears. He sits next to me on the hard orange bench, and I get in his lap, and we end up all chests and necks and arms holding tight.

*  *  *

My mama shows up by the buses lined up and down Flatbush Avenue. She pushes through the crowd to get to me and Aunt Eva.

“When did you talk to her?” I ask Aunt Eva, right as she's going, “When did you talk to her?”

Then we both go, “Shoot.”

“Sugar,” my mama gushes, shoving her belly right by Aunt Eva. “How you doing, sugar?”

“Who let you out?” I ask.

“Keisha, be nice to me,” she says. “I came all the way from Jersey.”

“What? You need money?”

She's dressed decent this time, and her hair's done. The last time she looked like she'd been car-washed and thrown in a dryer. The messed-up thing is, she can hide it better than anybody. She could be shooting three needles a day and time things right so nobody can tell.

Mamas and grandmas and aunts and a couple of daddies are tossing bags underneath or shouting for kids to act right. Most of the kids are real small. A lot of them are crying. They look the way I feel. Like they're scared when shove comes to smash, maybe our own don't need us too much.

I give Aunt Eva my biggest squeeze anyway.

“You better call me as soon as that thing pops out of her,” I whisper.

“Don't you call the baby ‘that thing,'” she whispers back. Then she goes, “You find a good time out there, you understand?”

From the bus window I pull faces and wave at Aunt Eva. I try real hard to ignore my mama, while Aunt Eva and my mama try real hard to ignore each other.

*  *  *

My mama was clean for fourteen months, eleven days, three hours, and I don't know how many seconds when I was eight and nine. She and Nick stayed with me and Aunt Eva that whole time, and she and Aunt Eva not only talked but even laughed some. Mama was afraid to leave the house for most of it, because she was all nerves about picking up, so she bought a dictionary and a thesaurus, and we played with words every day. Her, me, and Nick, all the time.

Veracity, misnomer, solecism, aphony, preterition, hypocrite, utopia.

My teachers started accusing me of cheating and plagiarizing, and then I won an in-class essay contest sponsored by the governor, and the district spelling bee, and then my mother went on a date and didn't come home, not for weeks, and the next time we saw her, she wouldn't look at Aunt Eva and begged me for my spelling bee money, and then I set her dictionary and thesaurus on fire in the bathtub and almost failed fourth grade and forgot to laugh.

*  *  *

A whole group of white people with a bunch of dogs are waiting around in a church parking lot when our bus pulls up. Most of us were busy sleeping the last hour, so we missed our first look at the country, but when I step down onto the gravel in front of a building with a steeple, so white and small and cute I could swear it was just a toy and not even a real church, I get the feeling of soft air and quiet like I never imagined. Even with the bags scuffing on the ground and kids waking up and crying and introductions going on all around and dogs without leashes barking and jumping, it's like I've been living on MTV and they just changed me over to the deep-sea special on the nature channel.

Somebody yells out my name, and I turn around, and there's this man and this woman with wrinkles that would put Yoda to shame and hair so thick and white a baby seal could hide right on their heads. Her eyes are green as a crayon, and his are blue like those trumped-up contact lenses. Their skin is tanned practically to my color, and they walk like professional basketball players: steady and smooth and solid, but with a little attitude poking out somewhere between heel and toe.

“Pleased to meet you,” he says, shaking my hand. She leans in and gives me some sugar before I even know what she's up to.

*  *  *

It's another forty-five minutes in the truck with Marge and Tom, who tell me about their two horses, chickens, three cows, a goat, a pig, and a huge vegetable garden. They say not to worry, they didn't want an older kid to do their work for them but just someone they could show a good time and not have to wipe their butts every two seconds. They don't say it exactly like that, but I listen between the lines.

They seem all right, and I've never been in a truck before, which is high up and sort of fun, even though I'm smashed between the two of them and his leg is touching mine and I'm thinking if he so much as tries to look at me funny, somebody's going to have to die, but then again, there's no other place his leg could be what with how crowded things are. And I'm liking the soft air and that I can look in any direction through the truck windows into the dark and the only light I see is from stars up in the sky, and it feels like we could drive right off the edge of the earth because there's no buildings or people or cars or anything anywhere.

“If you're worried you're stuck with just the two of us,” Marge says right when that's just exactly what I'm worrying about, “our grandnephew is arriving tomorrow morning for most of the summer, too. He's nineteen.”

I want 'Bread,
is all I'm thinking.

*  *  *

This nephew gets here while Marge is showing me how to collect eggs from under these damn chickens. I'll tell you one thing, I will never eat another chicken again as long as I live because these creatures are nasty-looking, for one, and for two, they act just like every little kid I ever knew and one of them looks enough like a little cousin of mine from the Bronx, I can't hardly keep a straight face about it, which you know has got to be serious. These eggs are the brown kind and have spots, and they're warm, which is sort of amazing and disgusting at the same time and makes me think of my mama with some big brown egg stuffed up inside of her, some brown thing she doesn't even want.

“Hi, Marge,” is what interrupts that train of thought, and I could pass out right here when one of the finest boys I ever saw—because as much as I love Gingerbread, he is not fine—walks right up into this dirty old chicken house and gives Marge some sugar.

“Sam,” Marge says, “this is Keisha. Keisha. Sam.”

He's dark-skinned and has eyes Marge's color, and he is buff, and if I wasn't so into 'Bread, I'd be a useless puddle by now.

“You ride yet?” he asks me. And I go, “Huh?” because all I can think of is sex. And he smiles, and I'm thinking his white teeth are going to reflect me blind, and he goes, “They've got horses here. You want to ride?”

*  *  *

We don't ride. I'm too scared, so we leave the horses and walk instead. He shows me what's got to be the entire state of Pennsylvania. We walk for hours and hours. I've never walked so much in my life. I've never been on the inside of so much grass and trees and fields and air filled with silky star-shaped seeds swimming by. I never stepped in cowshit or horseshit, never knew their piles were so damn big, even though if you think on it for two seconds, you know they'd have to be. I never saw tomatoes and cucumbers and corn and basil leaves growing up out of the ground or had round thorn balls get stuck in my socks either. I never knew pigs could be as tame as dogs, even though I read
Charlotte's Web
when I was small and “salutations” was one of the first words me and my mother and Nick found in her dictionary. I never knew that horses smelled like dirt and church lady sweat and hay mixed in or that their noses were softer than a baby's butt. I never knew you can think you understand what it means to live in this world, what it smells like and looks like and feels like on your skin and in your heart, and then, in less time than it takes to get your hair done, you can look up at a whole different sky and realize that all this time you didn't even know who you were, much less stop to wonder.

*  *  *

We sit by a pond where you can hear all kind of hooting movie bird sounds while your ass gets wet on the bank.

“How come you're so dark when Marge and Tom are so white?” I ask Sam. “You adopted?”

“Uh uh,” he says. “Marge is my mom's aunt. That's where I get my eyes. My dad's Puerto Rican.”

“So where's your mom?”

He shrugs. “Somewhere in Spain, the last we heard.”

I don't know what I'm supposed to say after that, so I throw more pebbles into the water. I like to see the circles spread out from the middle.
Concentric.

“Did you want to come here?” Sam asks me after a while.

“Uh uh,” I answer. “My mother's having a baby soon and had to move in with me and my aunt. I hate my mother.” I shrug. “So boom. Here I am.”

“Where's your father?”

“You must want to marry me,” I say, even though I started it, “with all these personal questions.”

He smiles and leans back. His T-shirt rides up so I can see his fine belly button with a little trail of hair disappearing down into his jeans. Lord.

“Sorry,” he goes. “I just think it's a little weird.”

“What?”

“My aunt and uncle having you come here.”

“I hear that,” I say. Then I go, “What, they never did this before?”

“Nope.”

“You want me to leave?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You do want me to leave.”

“I do not. You don't want to be here.”

“Would you?”

We stay still awhile. Then he plucks a grass blade from near his knee and tries to whistle by holding it between his thumbs and blowing into his cupped hands. The sound comes out all squeaky, and he gives up.

“Okay, for real,” I say, throwing a pebble at that belly button. “Are you a model or something?”

“Shit,” he goes.

I'll be damned. He is a model. He sits up and locks his hands around his legs. “You don't recognize me?” he asks.