Grace (3 page)

Last night, in spite of her headache, she gave Giselle her bath and sang nursery songs to her.

It is a song for a baby and Giselle is four, but she loves it.

“What else are you going to buy me, Mama?”

“Mama may not be able to buy you everything you want, but Mama will give you all the love in the world.”

“How much?” the child asked.

He imagined her opening her arms as wide as she could when she answered, “As much as this and more, much more.”

Giselle makes her happy
, he thinks.

“You have not been happy, either,” Sally is saying to him. She has stopped crying. Her hair had fallen across her face when she bent her head. Bits of it are still stuck to her wet cheeks. She pushes them away. The natural color of her hair is dark brown, but she has lightened it and wears it in a cascade of tight curls that reach just above her shoulders.

“Don’t try to weasel yourself out of this,” he says. “We are talking about you.”

“I am not trying to weasel myself out of anything. You, me, we have not been happy.”

But we were happy once.

“Are you having some sort of midlife crisis?” She will be forty on her next birthday. It is a reasonable explanation. Perhaps that is what it is.

“No,” she answers simply.

“I am happy,” he says.

“Liar.”

“I was happy until you started acting strangely. Coming home so late.”

“I went for a long walk last night.”

He has to make an effort not to say,
To read new graffiti on the walls in the street? For God’s sake, how does one learn how to be happy?
He has asked her that question many, many times.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“More.”

“More what?”

“More to my life.”

She was already a primary school teacher when he met her, but before that she had been an assistant editor at a small press in Manhattan. She wanted to be a poet and believed that being close to literary circles would give her the courage—courage is what she said it took—to harness the thoughts that swirled in her head.

Though by chance he had seen four of her poems, he made himself accept the reasons she gave him for changing her job. Jealousy? Fear? They were love poems. Written to a lover she had not forgotten? The passion in them frightened him so he chose to believe what she told him. The big publishing companies
were merging, swallowing everything in their way. Goliath struck the small press and it folded. And as if that were not enough, the poetry she was writing was no longer in vogue. Not for an African American writer, she said. She did not do performance poetry and she did not have the ear for rap. She was an anachronism at thirty.

But she was good with children. She loved them, a fact not lost on Justin when they were dating. He had been thinking it was time he had children. Then Giselle was born and she had no time for poetry. He and Giselle were enough, she said. She did not need more.

“It isn’t that I don’t love you,” she says to him now.

The double negative that is supposed to be a positive.

“Is that the same as saying ‘I love you’?” He asks the question, but not kindly. He does not feel kindly toward her.

“You know I love you.”

“And how would I know that? You turn away from me in bed.”

“That is not true, Justin.”

“You make love as if it is some chore you have to do.”

“You have not made it easy.”

“
I
have not made it easy? You think it is easy to put my arms around you when I can sense you don’t want me, that you are just doing your wifely duty?”

“It’s sex you want, Justin. I want more than sex.”

He laughs, but it is not a happy laugh. He laughs for relief for there is truth in what she says. When he heard breathing on the receiver, he was certain. Perhaps he was wrong to jump
to this conclusion, but then he was convinced that someone was there, waiting, hoping it would be she who would answer. The third time he turned cold with resentment and that night he acted the part of father, the role of supporting husband. He washed the dishes after dinner, read a bedtime story to Giselle and helped tuck her in bed, asked the usual questions about Sally’s day at work, offered anecdotes of his own, but all the time he guarded the wall he built around his heart, deepening his distance from her. He would not touch her when they went to bed. He would not let her humiliate him. Then familiar smells, the particular sweet odor of her skin, the scent of her soap and the lotion she smothered on afterward reminding him of the sea, the warmth of her body, the angles and curves next to him, aroused memories, habit. Desire, that traitor.

For sex? Let her call it desire for sex, but it was love, too. That is what he felt when his resolve melted away and he reached for her.

“And what more do you want?” he asks. He does not know what answer he hopes or wants to get.

“We can try,” she says.

“Love is not something you try to do,” he says. “Either you love me or you don’t. Either you want to be with me or you don’t.”

“I want to be with you, Justin. I love you.”

“But?” He asks the question harshly, the tone belying the hope that sprang in his heart.

“But …”

She sends his heart plunging again.

“I need more,” she says.

“More?”

She turns her head away from him. “There is nothing you can do.
I,”
she emphasizes the
I
, “I have to do it myself.
I
have to make me happy.”

Her repudiation stings him. “It was only graffiti, Sally,” he says. His lips curl. “Some mindless jerk’s scribbling. That’s all it was.”

She strikes back. “I am sorry I ever told you about it. To you intellectuals, anything that doesn’t come out of a book is some mindless jerk’s scribbling. Mindless or not, I believe him.”

“Do you hear yourself, Sally? You believe him? Some anonymous …” He struggles for a word. “Wall-defacer,” he spits out.

“Yes, I believe him.” She repeats the line she saw on the wall. “‘It takes strength to be happy.’ I want that strength, Justin. I want the strength to go after my happiness. I don’t want to take the road of least resistance.”

The word
road
stirs another memory of another conversation. “God, you fill your head with all that psychobabble.”

“It was a good book. I learned a lot from it. It helped me.”

“It helped you become dissatisfied with what you have. It helped to make you unhappy. We have so much, Sally.”

They are locked in silence.
We have so much.
Both of them know it is true.

They are sitting in the spacious kitchen of a duplex apartment they own, in a converted brownstone in gentrified Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Trees line their street, and in the spring there will be flowers in the concrete barrels on the pavements
and in the flower boxes under the windows of parlor floors of the other refurbished century-old buildings on their block. On one end of their street—comfortably distant from the squalor of Fulton Street, which in their area has already begun to change, replaced by boutiques and charming restaurants—is an old stone Methodist church, itself under renovation. At the other end is Fort Greene Park. Mothers take their children there, lovers lie in the grass in the summer. Spike Lee lived here not long ago, in one of the brownstones that border the park.

Justin had been clever enough and lucky enough to have bought this duplex before Park Slope became crowded and expensive, before young white professionals with dotcom incomes moved in and sent real estate prices soaring, displacing black families who had lived here for years never dreaming their landlords would sell. But Fort Greene was a stone’s throw from Manhattan Bridge, and the Yuppies knew it was a matter of time (and enough of them willing to be pioneers), before it would go the way of Park Slope: another oasis for liberal whites, Asians who had crossed over, and a sprinkling of over-educated but harmless blacks.

It is not lost on Justin that many of his colleagues consider him one of these harmless blacks, but he chalks this down to envy. The fact is he had bought the duplex when many of his black friends thought Long Island was the place to escape the spreading urban ghettoes. With his college professor’s salary, he could never have returned to Brooklyn later if he wanted to, as so many people he knows tried to do when the long commute
on the Long Island Expressway taxed their aging bones and loneliness set in for the gossip at the corner store.

There are three rooms on the top floor of their duplex, a master bedroom with its own bathroom, a smaller bedroom for Giselle with a bathroom adjacent to it, a den with a huge dark-wood desk, bookshelves stacked with Justin’s books, and a comfortable sofa. When they were first married, Justin invited Sally to share the den with him. She turned down his invitation. “I don’t want to disturb you,” she said. It was what he had hoped she would answer. The den is his alone, his own private space.

Downstairs in the kitchen where they are sitting at a round oak table, light pours through the huge windows on sunny days. Today is not a sunny day, but the kitchen is cheerful. Sally has made it cheerful. The walls are creamy, the cabinets a rich brown, the square tiles on the floor large and white. Sally hangs her orange pots on steel hooks that drop from the ceiling and puts green plants and purple and white African lilies in ceramic pots near the windows. Under the table is a colorful woolen rug. Giselle loves to sit on the rug when Sally is in the kitchen, especially when she is working at the table making pretty projects for the children in her class. Sally has made a special corner in the kitchen for Giselle’s toys, but Giselle does not play in her corner. She plays near Sally’s feet.

It’s a comfortable kitchen. The back door leads down a concrete staircase to a tiny garden which they share with the owner of the street floor apartment. It belongs to a married man, a doctor who keeps the apartment for his afternoon trysts. The
garden does not interest him and he lets Sally have total run of it. Even with the oak tree, there is space in the garden for wrought iron furniture, herbs, pink pansies in the spring and an assortment of annuals Sally plants every year.

The living room and dining room, which are in front of the kitchen, are in fact one large room with the original oak woodwork framing the ceilings, windows, and doors. The darkwood floors are covered with two large Oriental rugs, one under a mahogany dining set with an antique chandelier dropping above the table, the other between two plump couches and two matching armchairs in an assortment of red patterns. The room faces a quiet street and gets the afternoon sun.

Yes, Justin thinks, he and Sally have much to be grateful for. He wants to remind her of that.

“We have a lot,” he says.

“Things,” she says. “We have things.”

“Things matter. On a cold day like today, things matter, Sally. It won’t feel fine to be without a roof over your head on a day like today.”

All he wants to do is to convey the hunter’s need for recognition, for appreciation for his kill. But the millet gatherer, the bearer of children, the nurturer, does not want to feel beholden, nor believes she should.

“Are you threatening me?” Sally looks at him with steely eyes.

“You’ll be forty soon, Sally,” he says, his tone mollified. “A lot of people feel dissatisfied with their life at forty.”

“Yes. Maybe that is it. I will be forty soon.” She picks up the
wooden spoon and stirs the batter. It clunks against the sides of the ceramic bowl. Kitchen sounds. Domesticity restored. A house back to normal.

There will be time to talk again tomorrow, Justin thinks.

But suddenly Sally’s hand is moving faster. Muscles pop out from her forearm. Kitchen sounds become the crack of a spoon used as a weapon. “You
really
don’t want to know why I am unhappy, do you, Justin?” Sally’s fingers are curled tightly around the spoon; the knobs are pointed and shiny.

Justin’s stomach forms a knot. “I asked you,” he says. He cannot hide his exasperation.

“But you don’t want to know my answer. You only want to make fun of the books I read, the things I believe. You want to take the road of least resistance.”

He gets up.
A farce. I am in a farce.

“It is space I want, Justin. Space for Sally.” As suddenly as it began, her hand stops its whipping motion. She is looking directly at him. “I want to find Sally,” she says.

He will not be trapped in her little farce of the road of least resistance, her psychobabble. “I think I’ll go to the college after all,” he says.

“Do that,” she says.

But she drops the spoon and rushes out of the door before he can leave the room.

They were happy once. It was not a long time ago. Only eight months have passed since they were walking hand in hand through the park near their home, Giselle happily trailing behind them. It was Giselle’s half birthday. She was three and a half. Two of her friends had already turned four. She wanted a birthday party too. Sally tried to explain: She had six more months to go. What is six months? Giselle wanted to know. Half a year, Sally told her. You have a half a year more before you are four. Half a year more? Giselle was inconsolable. Then Sally had the idea of a halfway birthday. A half birthday, Giselle called it.