You Have the Wrong Man (16 page)

Iris didn’t mind listening to their speculations as long as she was still accepted in their circle. But when Iris and Terrell weren’t admitted to the high school day-care program, her friends started to avoid Iris during their chaotic lunch period and at the city bus stops, where she sometimes waited for them after school was dismissed. The novelty of being outcast wore off. She wheeled the umbrella stroller up and down the curbstones, bumping the nylon sling and startling the infant; the plastic dry-cleaning bag whipped in a mean wind, until he started bawling. By spring, Iris was totally abandoned by her high school friends, and she no longer tried to intercept them.

Maurice crossed the linoleum as if he were testing an ice pond. His jeans were slipping off his hips and bunched at his unlaced Cons. Maurice prowled towards her; his weight lagged behind or tumbled ahead. His legs couldn’t align with his trunk.

“You’re cranked,” she said.

He twirled around and fell on the couch. They had been forced to move in with Maurice’s mother, Vicki, and Vicki’s sister, Estelle. Iris was tender meat for that pair of harpies, and when Maurice was like this, he couldn’t protect her.

Iris asked Maurice, “Answer me this. You give up everything just because Marvin Gaye bought it off his own father?” Her eyes were burning. She noted that her tears were not the everyday drips but new and unplanned for, brimming in huge and pitiful droplets. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and stared at her moist palm.
Its shiny residue did not directly reveal the exact nature of the new disaster she faced, and she rubbed her hand on her knee.

Maurice crumpled to one side of the sofa. She stood over him and raised her voice. “So what about me and Terrell? This is
our
life, you know. It’s not just your life.”

Maurice fluttered his eyes, trying to follow, but he never met her level of conjecture, which was a steep threshold, and he couldn’t pull himself across its difficult lip. “My bro is gone,” he told her.

“Fuck that. That’s yesterday’s news.”

His eyeballs were tight. He flopped over on the sofa and stretched his legs out. He told her,
“We’re all sensitive people with so much to give—”

“What’s this?” Iris said. “Is that Marvin Gaye? Is that him? You make me crazy.”

“—Understand me, sugar,”
Maurice quoted the murder victim.

She smacked him. Maurice rolled onto his stomach and groaned with pleasure, which made her strike him again. His comic whimper alerted his mother and aunt. Iris started tugging his floppy arm and the whole household came apart.

Estelle pushed Iris away and she took off Maurice’s shoes, which should have been Iris’s chore. Maurice’s mother, Vicki, yelled at Iris, grabbing her white wrist, pinching a pleat of translucent skin between her sharp, lacquered fingertips.

“
You
fixed him,” Vicki hissed at Iris, blaming Iris for Maurice’s nod. She said, “It’s your mother’s money that buys his dope.”

“That’s cash for diapers,” Iris said.

“Shit. I guess he’s goofed on Pampers.”

“If he could, he would.”

“He’s had a shock and you’re no help,” Vicki told her. Vicki linked Gaye’s sudden demise to Maurice’s relapse, as if they were a chain-reaction phenomenon. “I’ve seen this for years. White girls enticing black men and making them crazy.”

Iris went to get the baby into his plastic safety seat. Weeks before, Maurice had used a wire cutter to remove the rudimentary safety seat from a grocery cart that he had rolled four blocks from the Star Market parking lot.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Vicki told her.

“I’m getting out of here.”

“That’s perfectly nice. You just put that baby down where he is.”

Iris looked at the slender black woman talking to her; Maurice’s mother was tense and muscled beneath an oversized
Thriller
T-shirt with its solitary sequined hand. Vicki’s features were sharp; her skin was sleek, honeyed Jamaican, but she wasn’t attractive. She was a mean streak in its condensed, petite human form right down to her spiky eyelashes caked with military green mascara. Iris understood that Vicki, not Maurice felled on the sofa, was her real opponent.

Iris strapped the baby into the plastic seat.

Vicki said, “You go ahead. Go on back to your own mother, but you leave my grandbaby here. He’s too sick to go out.”

“He’s not sick.”

“Oh, honey.”

Iris tossed her head. Her long hair whipped open like a golden saw wheel and Vicki backed up a few paces. Iris picked up her jacket and purse from the floor and crooked the baby seat on her hip.

“I’m saying,” Vicki said, “you’re not taking that child.”

Iris said, “This is my baby.
Your
baby’s lying over there. That one. That jab king—” She pointed to Maurice. Maurice’s hand was dangling off the sofa, his fingers fully opened in his innocent, drenched sleep.

It occurred to Iris that Vicki was fourteen years older than Terrell’s father, who was himself only fifteen years older than Terrell. Iris recognized that these three pitiful generations were set down in the world in not even as many decades. She wondered how many more repetitions might be introduced if she remained in that household.

Estelle watched from the kitchenette, where she was stripping a chicken carcass, nibbling tags of its chewy, burnt skin. She held its bony rib cage in her greasy hands. “I tell you, girl. Give that baby to his grandmother.” She started to wrap the carcass in a sheet of foil, keeping the Reynolds Wrap box squeezed in her armpit. Iris watched the chicken fat glittering on her fingers.

Vicki pinched Iris, plucking a solitary dimple of baby fat and twisting Iris’s cheek until the girl squeaked. An even greater affront to Iris was when she saw her own saliva dripping in a silver line from her skewed mouth. She pushed Vicki off and wiped her lips.

Estelle came over. She started smacking Iris on her head with the heavy Reynolds Wrap carton, sawing its serrated edge across Iris’s face.

The strip of metal teeth was sharp and left deep cuts.
Dots of blood lifted in two intersecting ellipses lines. Iris wiped her chin and blood came off on the palm of her hand. “You cut me! You cut me!”

“Shit, why’d you do that?” Vicki asked her sister.

“Hey, I don’t know,” Estelle said to Vicki. She, too, was shocked at the result. Estelle pushed her hand in her apron pocket and found a pack of menthol cigarettes. She lit up and shook out the match. She offered the Kool to Iris but Iris declined. Estelle wouldn’t take no for an answer and she tried to insert the filter tip between Iris’s lips, saying, “Here, now, honey.” Iris turned away. The two sisters retreated to the kitchen. Estelle shoved the foil into a drawer and picked up a dishrag, as if she might resume her household duties.

Iris adjusted the baby seat on her hip and turned the four dead bolts. She tugged the steel door open. Her cheek was stinging. At the elevator, she waited for the light to indicate the cage was coming. Nothing. She ran down the hall to the outside stairwell. It was the fifth floor and from that height she could see the mercury streaks of the Providence harbor reflecting engorged beams and gold puddles from the street lights and glowing ribbons of traffic on I-95. The wind was strong and it carried a rich, unrelenting scent from Narragansett Bay. She started down the cement treads. Blood dripped from her chin and she saw its tiny red stars and asterisks on every landing. The baby was squawking.

An hour later, Iris stood at the entrance of the Stop Over Shelter. The doormat was made from furred strips of common discarded tire treads and she instinctively wiped her
feet on its waffle weave. No one came to answer the door. The women’s center was in an Italian neighborhood west of Federal Hill, where the old-worlders were dying out and university professors, leftists, and do-gooders prevailed. Terrell was squirming and she released him from the baby seat and rested the seat on the stoop. She jiggled the baby on her hip to see if he would quiet. He wasn’t consoled by her cooing or soothed by her touch; her brisk repetition of kisses across his wrinkled forehead only seemed to smart him. He didn’t stop crying. Sometimes, when this happened, when the baby didn’t respond to her efforts, she clutched his rib cage in both hands, extended her arms, and shook him to make him stop. His big head whipped back and forth on his narrow shoulders. His eyes pinched closed with the vibrations, then bloomed wide open, but he didn’t shut up.

The baby cried. It was not a simple effort, but a complex, congested bawling, an inconsolable fusion of its wounded infantile psyche and its imperiled miniature body, between involuntary gasps for breath.

Iris shook her baby; her relief was immediate. She again held Terrell on her hip.

Iris depressed the doorbell and fiddled with the intercom at the front door. No one was coming very fast. A keypad to the left of the door regularly blinked, giving the stoop a green pulse. Iris expected to see someone’s angry boyfriend lurking around, but there wasn’t anyone. Her own Maurice might have followed her there, but he had not even shifted from his horizontal cloudscape when his aunt had attacked her with the box of foil.

For quite some time Iris knew that her home life had disintegrated past any saving grace. What had set the
wrecking ball in motion was a public tragedy in the elite black music world, in that R&B nation to which she didn’t belong and in which she therefore had no clout when Maurice went back to heroin. Iris started to think that she should actually praise Gaye’s father for bringing it to a head. She decided, in a fit of pique, to send the murderer a thank-you card once she could find out the address of the security facility where he was being held pending a hearing.

After leaving the apartment, she had called the women’s shelter from a Roy Rogers’ Chicken, where she bought coffee. She tried to ask directions to the Stop Over Shelter, but a kid had just sunk a frozen block of drumettes into the fryer and the sputtering grease kept her from hearing. She asked the counselor to repeat the street number. “And you’ll take my baby, Terrell?” she said. The counselor told her that the S.O.S. shelter would not take children into the program unless accompanied by a legal guardian. Iris could not just drop the baby off as she had planned to do.

“You can’t take him?” she said. A crosscurrent of sensations prickled her when she pictured the baby alone. She pictured him in someone else’s arms. First he is crying, then he is laughing. He’s fat and healthy; he’s a toddler; he’s five years old; he’s full-grown. She recalled the official medical expectations, and this halted her fantasy with a familiar, chilly relief.

In any case, she didn’t plan to stay long in the Stop Over Shelter. She didn’t wish to share her secrets with nosy counselors who might make her do housekeeping chores or force her to study for the GED, and she didn’t like the idea of sleeping in a row of beds between bruised-up girls, hiding from their own mistakes.

The counselor told her, “We have twice as many cribs
as beds, but we’re not an orphanage. We’re set up for women who are seriously threatened in their domestic situation.”

Iris explained Estelle’s attack with the Reynolds Wrap box.

“Gee, honey, that sounds pretty bad. You come right over with your baby.”

Iris remembered the last place she had fled to. There was a low paddock of babies holding filthy bottles of diluted apple juice as other tots warred over a few broken-armed dolls. The babies loitered around a community toy box with the manhandled remains of items issued every year by the Toys for Tots campaigns organized by local Harley-Davidson Owners Groups. That room of broken dolls and tattered games had looked like the littered, open-air rag-and-bone shops after hurricanes.

The woman at the Stop Over Shelter told Iris, “Our kitchen has a good supply of bottles, nipples, disposable nursers. We have Enfamil in cans and we also have the canisters of powder. Or, maybe you’re breastfeeding?” Iris recognized the hopeful hesitation in the woman’s voice, the same tone as the hospital’s nurse-midwife who had tried to convince her to let Terrell suck while she was still on the delivery table. She was considering the task when another nurse grabbed the baby from her breast and scolded the midwife about having to take necessary precautions “with this one.”

“Breast or bottle?” the voice asked.

“I get WIC coupons for Similac.” Iris did not enjoy the telephone interview.

Iris read a sign over the glass transom: “Nothing Is Permanent But Change.” The sign wasn’t consoling. Iris didn’t
wish to keep having things change. For months, things in her life had been changing for the worse with malevolent precision. Events changed from unattractive to ugly, from monstrous to heinous, from black to pitch-black. She looked at the baby in her arms. His pinched features as he sputtered with discomfort did not encourage her. When she was pregnant, she had not foreseen the consequences of having this mixed child. She had escaped her suburban home, which she could not return to without arousing her lover’s suspicions, or her own mother’s hopes of a reunion.

Terrell was cute enough to encourage her close attention. Yet there were times she couldn’t bear to lift him out of his bed, a tiny square of consistently damp foam she had cut out to fit an old bassinet. The streets were too rough to wheel Terrell after dark when she most desired to be away from her surroundings. She shared one bedroom with Maurice, the baby, and two of Maurice’s younger brothers who had spread out into her space without even thinking. Stacks of disposable diapers had melted on the electric radiator; the pool of baby oil from the tipped bottle had never been tended to and had soaked a mound of laundry which she had left unsorted on the floor. The boys’ basketball sneakers littered the room in various perches, like futuristic chicle sculptures.

Lilacs were growing in oddball droops on either side of the shelter’s doorstep and she recognized yet another scent—sweet yeast from a bakery somewhere. The lilacs’ perfume coupled with the tangy, fermenting dough made her want to put the baby down. She felt his weight in her sore wrists and elbows.