Single Mom (39 page)

“Is it an original?” my father asked me.

I grinned. It was his typical question, and the more I noticed myself in him, the more I realized that I wanted to make a change.

“No, it’s not. But I don’t think that takes away from the message. It’s still an excellent painting whether it’s an original or not,” I responded to him.

Beverly swiftly jumped in and said, “You can’t come here and sit down. Everyone has to help set the table. You have a pregnant woman on the premises.” She always knew how to handle my father just right. In fact, Beverly was the social match of anyone. She was simply gifted in that way.

We all set out the turkey, string beans, potatoes, wild rice, stuffing, gravy, buttered biscuits, and cranberry sauce.

“You didn’t fix all of this on your own, did you?” my mother questioned Beverly.

“Not at all. Walter helped me every step of the way.”

“Well, you’re going to need some help around here when the baby comes. Have you two started thinking about a maid or a nanny?”

In the light of a recent child neglect/murder case involving a nanny from Britain, Beverly and I were terrified of the thought, but it
had
crossed our minds. We had had a long discussion about it.

“We’ve decided that it will be a long and grueling process of selection, so we’ve started looking at different avenues to go in already,” I explained.

“You can never be too careful about that kind of thing,” my father warned.

I never liked any of the day-care providers that I had as a kid. I could not remember far enough to recall any nanny in my life. And I had never asked.

“Did you have a nanny for Walter?” Beverly asked on cue.

I looked at her, smiled, and shook my head. My wife was simply mystical sometimes.

She said, “What, I wasn’t supposed to ask that question?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just that you were reading my mind as usual, that’s all.”

“Oh,” she responded.

My mother answered, “Walter didn’t get a nanny until after I stopped breast-feeding him around eight or nine months.”

I was embarrassed. “Look, ah, can we talk about this
after
we eat,” I complained.

“Aww, what’s wrong, sweetie? Breast-feeding is natural,” my mother teased me.

“Mother, I’m trying to concentrate on eating right now,” I responded. I always wondered why my parents never had another child. When I asked them as a kid, they used to talk about how expensive children were. Then for years, they told me they were considering adopting a little sister, but that never happened. I was tempted to ask about it again, but I changed my mind. It was far too late to change anything. Beverly and I planned to have at least two kids. We both agreed that a child should have someone to share its young experiences with, and Beverly had a great upbringing with her sisters. I just hoped and prayed that we didn’t have all girls like her parents had. But if that
were
to happen, then at least I still had Walter.

We wasted no time digging into our food. We said a family prayer and began to pass the wild rice and turkey.

“Is this Uncle Ben’s rice?” my mother asked.

Beverly nodded. “Mmm-hmm. Yes, it is.”

One of the reasons why my parents considered child-rearing so expensive was because they were reckless, name-brand consumers. I never had a piece of Kmart or Sears clothing in my life. Everything was from the high-grade department stores. Everything had to be “the best.” However, buying a child “the best” of everything didn’t necessarily guarantee him a healthier childhood. Love, happiness, and sharing good, clean fun with children went a long way, producing confident and progressive adults, who were not hung up on supposed quality.

I thought again about having a good, long conversation with my father while we all ate. He was there physically, but his mind was somewhere else. I hadn’t talked to him about business in a while. Mom told me a few years ago that he was getting involved in real estate again, and I wondered how that was going. My father had talked to me back then about making another killing off white families who wanted to move
back
into the city. It was supposedly a national trend to regain the cities from black residents who were perceived as running them into the ground. According to my father, the process had already started and was heating up at a rapid pace across the country. He said that I would have known that had I worked in the real estate department at the bank. And he was right, because plenty of bank loans were being secured for new or renovated housing in urban areas. He called it “re-urbanization,” and he wanted to hire some new young white faces to do his handiwork.

“Are you still thinking about re-urbanization?” I decided to ask him. I was curious about it myself, especially if my father may have been thinking of cutting me off, which I strongly doubted. Nevertheless, I did think about it, and with my growing interest to break into some form of entrepreneurship, compounded by my boredom at work, I could use something new to get me going again.

My father nodded. “I’m looking at a few properties. Yeah,” he answered. He looked alive and inside of the room again. “Why, are you getting interested now?”

I had never told him that I wasn’t interested, he just
assumed
that I wasn’t because I had previously spent so much time trying to establish my own interests. At the time, I didn’t want to commit to the idea either. If I
did
get interested, I wanted to try things on my own.

“You still think that you need the right color faces to do it?” I asked him.

He said, “Not in some areas. We have some well-to-do black families buying up urban housing, too.” Then he looked at Beverly and added, “You all are going to need a house soon.”

“Yes, we probably will need a bigger house,” Beverly said. She knew I was about to hit the ceiling, but it was too late.

My father’s comment was true, of course, but I didn’t like how he said it. He made it sound as if we didn’t have a house. I always felt that nothing I did was quite good enough for him.

I snapped, “I can’t seem to get your support or respect on
anything
I ever say or do!”

“Walter, we respected and supported you on plenty of things. How could you say such a thing?” my mother cut in.

“He’s been saying stuff like that his entire life. He’s never been appreciative of what we’ve given him,” my father added.

“That’s because you’ve been holding it over my head like some kind of
ode
to my parents!” I shouted. “You’ve done what any parents should do; provide for your child. Yet you think you should be awarded for it. And that’s not the way to go about receiving love from a son,” I told them.

“That’s like every time I buy Beverly some flowers or a bracelet, I turn around and say, ‘See how much I love you’ and expect her to be excited about that. You can’t buy love, you have to share it and make it surround yourself and your children.”

“Walter, we did surround you with love,” my mother refuted. “What are you talking about?”

“No, you surrounded me with
things
. So I was always
searching
for love; love for myself, as well as love from others.”

My father stopped eating and wiped his mouth. I knew what that meant; it was time to go to war!

He said, “I know one thing, if he still doesn’t see all that we’ve tried to do for him, then we need to stop trying to force ourselves on him. And it’s a shame that kids are growing up to disrespect their parents like they’re doing nowadays. I guess the last days are really here.”

Beverly held my arm at the table before I jumped up and hit the roof. My father was pulling himself from his chair. I said, “Good, let’s take a drive and get this thing settled.”

He looked startled. I guess I had never stood up to him before. My mother was always in the way somehow.

“It’s cold outside,” she complained, interjecting again. “You don’t need to be out there. We had to warm the car up for twenty minutes before we drove out here today.”

I said, “We have coats. And we’re men.”

My father nodded. “All right. Let’s talk then.”

“Talk about what?” my mother insisted. “We can talk about whatever we need to talk about right here.”

Beverly said, “It’s not a “we’ kind of talk, Mrs. Perry. It’s a father-and-son kind of thing.”

My mother looked at her pregnant daughter-in-law, ready to respond, but thought better of it. My father and I then grabbed our coats and headed for the front door.

“Well, how long are you going to be out there?” she asked.

I looked at my father and answered, “As long as it takes.”

My father looked at his watch and responded, “We’ll be back before six.”

I didn’t look at my watch to see how much time that would give us because I didn’t care. I planned on driving my car, and I wasn’t letting my father out until I said everything I wanted to say to him.

“Well, make sure you drive carefully. Okay?” my mother asked of us.

“I will,” I told her. Then I gave Beverly a hug and a kiss. She gave me a quick stare. I said, “Okay. I remember.” She was telling me to keep my composure.

As soon as I walked out the door and down into the garage with my father, he began to head for his car.

I said, “We’re going to take my car.”

“No, we’re not.”

“Why aren’t we? I’m the one who decided to take this ride. Not you. So we should be using my car.”

He looked over at my gray Lincoln and submitted without a word. I clicked the door open with the remote system so he could climb in, and walked over to the driver’s side.

“Do you have temperature controlled seats?” he asked, rubbing his hands.

“Yes, I do,” I answered.

“Well, put it on.”

“It is on. It has to warm up first.”
The same way you have to warm up
, I thought of commenting. My father had been like a statue for as long as I can remember. He rarely smiled, laughed, or seemed to enjoy himself. His life seemed to just drag along, with each new day presenting a new problem to solve.

“What is it with you?” I asked him. “You’re a successful man, so what makes you so damn angry?” I thought of the conversation I had with my son at the Titan Hotel.

“I’m not angry,” my father answered. “I’m just disappointed.”

“Disappointed in what? In me?”

He looked me in my eyes and said, “You should be disappointed in yourself.”

“Well, I got news for you. I’m
not
disappointed,” I responded. “I think every day about finding new ways to enjoy my life. You need to learn how to do the same.”

My father nodded. “Yeah, I see. You’re going to become like all the rest of them; laughing, drinking, and wasting their damn lives. I knew it all along. That’s just how you wanted to be, no matter what I tried to teach you. You went right out and got some damn girl pregnant.”

“And I
love
my son,” I told him. It didn’t even bother me anymore. The reality of my son was
his
problem, not mine. I had done enough alienating, and I wasn’t planning on doing it anymore. My entire life had been about alienation, from my parents, from the black community, from women I was attracted to, and from the world in general. I just never felt a part of anything. And I didn’t want to feel that way anymore.

“These illegitimate kids are the main ones out here doing crime, going to jail, and just screwing up the image of hardworking,
good
black folks,” my father snapped.

I said, “And that’s exactly what I don’t want my son to add to. That’s why it’s so important for him to be loved and accepted by his father
and
his grandfather, instead of being frowned on and shunned.”

My father looked away, feeling guilty. He knew that he was wrong. “And what about his mother? What kind of woman is she?” he asked me.

“She’s a hardworking, successful businesswoman who cares very much about her sons. But you never gave her a human chance. You wrote her off without ever even meeting her.”

He looked at me and asked, “She has two of them, and both are out of wedlock, right?”

He knew the answer already, so I ignored the question. “The point is, she
hasn’t
and
will not
give up on the struggle to raise her kids correctly, no matter
how
they got here. Nevertheless, she needs support from the men who helped create her children, just like black people need support from the greater white society who created their situation of underclass poverty.”

“Junior, these nonworking, shiftless welfare folks created their
own
poverty by not sacrificing time and effort to get educated and dig themselves out of the pits of the ghetto,” my father responded. “Plenty of these poor white folks did it. And many of them were in the same situations that we were. Especially here in Chicago. Who do you think was the underclass when the stock markets crashed? Black folks didn’t have millions of dollars in it.

“Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a
black man, founded
Chicago, but now
we’re
the underclass!” he snapped. “It’s because we’ve stopped working hard and got used to somebody
giving
us something instead of going
out and
earning
it. Now this woman laid down and spread her legs. You didn’t rape her, did you?”

My father was as good at dramatic performances as my mother was. I said, “I may as well have raped her. I got her pregnant and walked away. That could be considered a rape; a rape of humanity, bringing a child into this world without the balance of the two people who created him.

“That’s why it was so important for me to attend the Million Man March when I did. I needed to atone for the things I’ve done in
my
life. And I still do.”

My father grunted. “Is that how you really feel?” he asked me.

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, how come you didn’t marry this girl then?”

“For the same reason that white folks won’t marry us. Plain ignorance,” I answered. “I was raised not to associate with her
type
, whatever that means, and so my involvement with her was only temporary, which wasn’t right.”