I had a hard time figuring out what to wear, which is unusual for me. My theory about dressing is, if you keep enough outrageous items tossed around the apartment, you can throw one of them on with your jeans, and you’re dressed. Throw one of them on with a black leather miniskirt and you’re dressed to succeed in love. Something about Sammy, though, made me choose the jeans to go with my red leather, pointy-toed cowboy boots with the map of Texas embroidered on the side. I stopped on the way to the subway station and bought some flowers.
Sammy lived in a substantial pre-war apartment on West End Avenue. The doorman said she lived on the first floor, right up a flight of old marble steps, so worn that they sloped down in the middle. I raced up the stairs, trying to outrun my nervousness. The heels of my boots clattered against the marble, making an embarrassing racket. I rang the bell, and could not believe what I saw when the door opened.
It was a kid! She was a sharp, New York kind of kid, though, in black leggings and an enormous black t-shirt with a picture of Bob Marley on it. She looked like an even tinier version of Sammy. She said, “Hi, you must be Laurie. I’m Annie. Come on in. Momma’s in the kitchen.” Then she turned around and went back into the apartment, leaving me standing at the open door.
I stepped into this pleasant apartment. High ceilings, good woodwork, cream-colored walls, big windows, lots of light. A few bright rugs, a few big, comfortable pieces of furniture, lots of bookshelves, a couple of cats. And more kids. For a moment I panicked and thought there were dozens of them. I took a deep breath and counted. Including Annie, there were three. I wondered if I should add in the number of cats. Then I wondered exactly what it was I was doing.
Annie was already back at a coffee table with an even younger girl playing Parcheesi, a game I hadn’t thought about in… I found myself counting again… twenty-eight years. When did I get so old? And why was it just dawning on me just then?
There was a baby on the floor in a diaper and a t-shirt. At least it looked like a diaper, but it wasn’t plastic, it was some kind of fuzzy cloth. The baby was chewing on some wooden blocks.
I stood there, my knapsack over one shoulder and my paper cone of flowers in the other, feeling like a visitor to another planet. Sammy came walking out of the kitchen. She had on jeans and a brown sweatshirt, and one of those aprons that cover up most of a person. She was wiping her hands on the apron, and she was looking at me. She didn’t have on the bright red lipstick she was wearing at the party, or any make-up at all. She looked nice enough, in a quiet way, but I was a little disappointed. She had looked fabulous that first night! Spectacular!
She said, “Have you met my girls?”
“Sorry, Mom,” said Annie, looking up. “I forgot. I’m too busy trying to keep Sarah from cheating.”
Sarah started a whining moan. “Ooh-ooh-ooh. I do not cheat, you liar. You’re the one that always cheats!”
Sammy stepped in and calmed the girls down, but I was in too much shock to catch the details. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get through dinner and how soon I could leave afterwards. I was wondering how I could have been so wrong about Sammy. How could she have missed that I had been putting the make on her. Had it all been just a misunderstanding on my part? But damn it, there had been no mistaking the way she danced with me. Or had there been?
Then Sammy was taking my flowers and thanking me, and saying I should come in the kitchen while she found a vase and finished up dinner. She turned and went ahead of me. I followed, eyes fixed on her sweet, high, round ass covered with tight, faded denim and topped with the string bow from her apron.
The kitchen smelled good and it was pleasantly cluttered. I got a funny feeling when I saw the refrigerator covered with school papers and crayon drawings and notes, all of it stuck up with magnets. That kind of thing still existed? Here, in New York City, at the tail end of the twentieth century? When I calmed down a little and thought about it, of course, I had to have known that this kind of thing still happened. I’m going to tell you the truth, even though I can see now that it doesn’t reflect well on me. I thought it was the not-quite-hip girls, the not-smart-enough ones—the boring ones, O.K.?—who ended up with a refrigerator looking like this. Not someone like Sammy, who looked like a fire in that red dress and danced like a flame and made me hot, hot, hot. What the hell was going on here?
I ended up helping Annie set the table. She unfolded a blue-checked tablecloth and Sammy put my flowers in a pitcher in the middle, with candles on either side. While we were working, Sammy called out, “Elena, supper’s almost ready.”
A door off the kitchen that I thought led to a closet opened and out came this young woman with long dark-blond hair and pale skin and cat’s-eye glasses. She looked in her early twenties. The other girls, Annie and Sarah, and Rachel, the baby, all looked to one degree or another, black. But Elena’s complexion was fairer than mine, and her hair was perfectly straight and silky. How old must Sammy be, if she was the mother of this woman? I tried to conduct a discreet surveillance to determine whether more children were popping out of closets, drawers, wherever. I didn’t see any, but I was nervous.
Sammy picked up a tureen with pot holders and carried it towards the table, saying, “Elena, would you please make sure that Rachel has a dry diaper and that Sarah washes her hands?”
And then we were all seated at the table, and they all held hands and said “Blessings on the mealtime.” We started eating split pea soup and salad and whole-wheat dinner rolls. The kids told knock-knock jokes, which made me laugh, and demonstrated terrible manners, which I thought was even funnier, but Sammy didn’t. Annie got sent to her room awhile for telling Sarah that the soup was made of frog guts. No amount of persuasion was sufficient to convince Sarah to try the soup after that.
Annie was back in time for dessert, though, which was baked apples with cream. Somewhere during the course of this, I realized that Elena was not Sammy’s daughter, but a graduate student at Columbia. She was from Czechoslovakia and helped with the children in return for room and board. She lived in the small room off the kitchen. After dinner, the girls showed me the room that they shared. It was tiny, and filled with three beds, and all kinds of art supplies and toys and dolls and clothes and Annie’s CDs.
Annie said, “You wanna see Momma’s room? It’s right here.” I knew I shouldn’t. I should wait for some time when Sammy wanted to show me. But I really wanted to see it, so I went in anyway. I was looking for clues. If a guy has a jumbo size box of condoms next to his bed, that tells me something. If a woman has black leather underwear and handcuffs strewn across the floor, that gives me an idea of what to expect.
Sammy’s room was also small, and absolutely crammed with books. The bed was stripped to the bare mattress. A quilt and some pillows were stacked on a worn armchair that was crammed into the space between the bed and the window.
Elena appeared behind us and looked over my shoulder into the room. “Oh no, I forgot the sheets in the dryer. I will scream should the swine from the third floor have thrown them on the filthy floor.” It sounded funny in her soft, elegant accent. She ran down the hall and a moment later I heard the front door of the apartment slam shut behind her.
Annie sighed. “We have to do Momma’s sheets every night. Elena and Momma and me take turns, because it’s such a pain. Rachel gets out of bed every night and crawls in with Momma. Her diapers leak. We’ve tried everything. Come on, you want to play Parcheesi?”
I was mesmerized, fascinated, and horrified by the life in this strange place. It paralyzed me. I stayed on, through an endless game of Parcheesi, Annie’s violin practice, Sarah’s good-night story, Rachel’s good-night story. Eventually, Annie announced she was retiring for the evening to read. Elena supervised the little ones’ baths, while Sammy made a pot of coffee.
I stood beside her watching her pour it, feeling comfortable, and that made me nervous. I’d spent over a decade in the big city living the life of an emotional transient. I knew why I had come to Sammy’s apartment, but I didn’t know why I’d stayed once I knew the score, once I’d seen the hotbed it was of fertility and stability and all those related anti-aphrodisiacs. The warm, full smell of coffee rose as she turned to me, holding out a chipped mug by its handle. I looked at the curve of her forearm and her sweetly plump wrist. Her fingers were surprisingly thin and elegant. I reached out and held the mug in both hands although the coffee was hot.
Just then Elena brought in the little girls, clean and sweet-smelling from their bath. Sarah kissed her mother good night and Elena led her off to bed.
I tried to calm myself by focusing on the reason I had come here. I watched little Rachel crawl onto her mother’s rocker and I wondered what final ritual of good night would be necessary before I would be alone with Sammy. Rachel settled comfortable in Sammy’s lap and placed her fat little hands on Sammy’s sweatshirt. Then Sammy pulled up the bottom of her sweat shirt, revealing her left breast, round and plump in a red lace bra. She unsnapped the front closure with one hand. In response, her breasts hopped slightly apart. She peeled off the left cup, revealing her brown breast and her large, brownish-pink nipple.
Rachel wasted no time in fixing her baby lips on Sammy’s nipple. At first, she made little gulping noises, and then she slowed down, so the only evidence of her swallowing was the rhythmical movement of her throat muscles. Her little fat hand stroked the top of Sammy’s breast to the same beat.
I hadn’t ever considered a prospective lover’s breasts as baby food production before. I glanced down at my own flat chest as if it were an enemy in my camp. When I looked up again I saw Sammy watching me with amusement. She’d been watching me all night, now that I thought about it. I felt set-up and angry but as I watched the baby suckle, I felt the emotion fade, replaced by desire or even something deeper. I was aware of a terrible longing, a pull towards something I’d never known I wanted. I’d been a lot of places, done a lot of things. I’d lived as if I was afraid to leave any sensation unexplored, miss any experience. And I tell you this: I hadn’t let many chances go by. But I knew then I’d never felt what they were feeling.
I drank my coffee.
Sammy rubbed Rachel’s little hand for a moment, and then she looked up at me. “Before we go any further, I wanted you to see what you’re getting into.”
I had seen plenty.
In spite of my misgivings that first night at Sammy’s apartment, or maybe because of them, I was fascinated with her. I tried hard not to be too obvious: I tried to be cool. And actually, it wasn’t that hard, because, between her patients and family, Sammy didn’t have a lot of free time to spend alone with me.
She invited me over for a rerun of the whole-damn-family show fairly often. The first few times I refused, would only see her if she could get away for a party or a movie, with me for dessert, of course. I made up some pretty good excuses, but I was also sure she knew what my problem was. I ran out of excuses after awhile, and began accepting her invitations. Or maybe I couldn’t get enough of her.
The first few weeks, we made love only at my apartment. She wouldn’t sleep over; she wanted to be home when the girls woke up. She didn’t ask me to stay at her place until the girls knew me pretty well and then I refused to stay the first time she asked—a retaliatory gesture. Sammy just smiled at me, this irritating, knowing, beautiful smile. That made me so angry that I jumped out of bed and walked all the way to my apartment at two o’clock in the morning, fuming the whole way.
By the time I left for Florida, I’d stayed over maybe a half-dozen times. The lovemaking was great—with me in bed, how could it be otherwise? But it wasn’t as terrific as at my place. She was preoccupied. Or maybe she was just listening out for the girls, but I suspected it was more than that. She wasn’t just listening for them… they were taking up space inside her. My pain surprised me, because, to say the least, I’ve never been the jealous type. I’ve never felt I owned a lover’s body, let alone his or her heart and soul. All I’ve asked for has been the moments we were together. With Sammy, I felt that even that wasn’t all mine.
After we made love, she’d made me put on a t-shirt to sleep in. Sometimes during the night, Rachel would slip into bed between us. Then I’d wake up, the early morning light would be bathing my lover, and Rachel would be nursing. I’d give Rachel a dirty look that was meant to say, “Why don’t you give us a break, kid?” She seemed to understand, because she’d nestle even closer to Sammy and suck harder. What was I to do, just lie there full of jealousy towards a baby? Anyway, there was usually that ammonia smell in bed which I had learned was a bad omen. In the end, I was a woman who knew she’d be beaten. That’s when I’d get up and make coffee.
So we had never slept late together. Never. We hadn’t had any luscious mornings in bed with some sleepy, good-morning sex, and then breakfast in bed, and more sex, and maybe a nap. I don’t know, maybe I thought that if I pulled off this quest for her, she’d think she owed me a weekend away together.
Her ‘big favor’ had become a quest for me. Something I had to do. Should I have questioned myself more closely about my motives, made sure what it was I hoped to obtain before I left? Hell, yes, but then I would have been someone else if I thought before jumping into an act of love, wouldn’t I?
When Sammy realized I was planning to head off for Port Mullet right away, she insisted she hadn’t meant for me to make a special trip of it. What she had in mind, she said, was for me to work it in to my next visit to my folks. She hadn’t yet grasped how rare my family visits were, mainly because I never spoke of them. But now that I had agreed to do it, I wanted to get going. The distance might give me time to ask what I was doing with a family woman when I was allergic to families.
Besides, something occurred to me. Sammy, who overflowed with self-sufficiency, mental health, and clear thinking had this one chink to her carefully constructed life—her unresolved feelings about her father. She wasn’t in the habit of asking favors of anyone, but she’d asked this of me. My growing need for Sammy was making me nervous. Well, now she needed me. It might be my only chance to even up the score.
Before I left, Sammy told me the little she did know about her father, Elijah Wilson. She had never seen him; he drowned before she was born. At the time of his death, Sammy’s mother was living near Port Mullet. Not in it, of course. No blacks lived in Port Mullet back then. Her mother lived out somewhere in the unincorporated part of the county. After Sammy’s father died, her mother went back to Alabama to live with her own father, Sammy’s grandfather.
As a child in Port Mullet, I didn’t even know black people lived anywhere in the county. Only the few well-off families had their “colored help.” It never occurred to me to wonder where they lived.
It wasn’t until I was in the sixth grade that someone announced that the colored school was closing and the children were coming to our school. Until then, I hadn’t ever heard of the colored school. By that time some folks were beginning to say “negro,” while for others saying “colored” was already making a point not to say nigger, so a lot of people didn’t see the need to make any further effort. I wished my own parents had stuck with “colored,” because “negro,” in their Florida woods accent, came out “negra”, perilously close to the epithet to be avoided.
When I asked where all those children I hadn’t even known about had been all this time, I was told they had had their own school, Booker T. Washington School, over by where they lived. Out in the quarters, they said, you know, Piney Woods Road.
The following September, a handful of scared black children showed up. Two of them were in my class. None of their teachers came, though, and I remember wondering what had happened to them.
Sammy grew up in the red clay hills of Alabama. She claims she remembers with a certain perverse fondness the bathrooms and drinking fountains marked “colored.” At least in that time and place, she says, it was clear what she was up against.
I told Jerry I’d figure some way to get a good article out of the trip, but he was doubtful.
“Tampa? Who cares about Tampa? Why don’t you go to Miami? Things are happening in Miami.”
“Unh-uh. Tampa.”
“So, what’s there? Night clubs, fashion, big money, culture?”
“Unh-uh. But there is something…”
“What?”
“Hot dog vendors.”
“Laurie, love, you want to write a piece on hot dog vendors, go to the corner out there. Abdul. Northeast corner. Tell him I sent you.”
“These are very young women, you know, with firm thighs and nice tans and aerobicized muscles. They set their stands out beside the highway, and they all wear those thong bathing suits.”
“I’m beginning to get the picture.”
“Yeah, and they stand with their backsides to the cars. Seems that it is often necessary for them to bend way over their carts to reach things, and...”
“Hmmm. Maybe I better go check this story out myself.”
“No way, Jerry.”
I left my apartment very early and dropped by Sammy’s on my way to the airport. I knew she wouldn’t be home. She was off at The Birthing Place delivering a baby. I’d spoken to her earlier on the phone and we’d whispered some things that would serve to keep me perking along nice and warm until I got back to her.
So, why was I stopping to say goodbye to her
apartment
? A few rooms in a building? I was accustomed to following my impulses, but up until I met Sammy, I’d understood them better. Up until then, they’d been pretty simple, dealing mainly with food, drink, and sex.
Elena answered the door. She had a textbook in one hand and Rachel tucked under her other arm. She smiled when she saw me. “Laurie!” I liked the soft, slightly foreign way she pronounced my name. It made me feel European and mysterious. “You go to airport station soon, yes? I am so pleased you visit before your journey.”
She dropped the book face down on the table in the hall, careful not to lose her place. She headed back into the apartment, with Rachel still under her arm. She obviously assumed I meant to come in and stay awhile.
I stood in the entrance for a moment, not ready to go all the way in. Annie was alternately practicing the violin and arguing with Sarah. Elena was trying to finish cooking dinner with Rachel on her hip. Sarah was whining that she needed help with her puzzle, and Elena called from the kitchen, “Get Laurie to help you.” I felt a sour pang in my stomach.
But I stepped in. I’m doing this for Sammy, I told myself. It’s just one of those good manners things. You’re nice to your lover’s family.
I sat on the floor beside Sarah and helped her fit the pieces of her puzzle together. I wanted to be bored by it, to be doing it just for Sarah, and, by extension, for Sammy. Actually, it was fun. I didn’t do many puzzles as a child, and none as an adult. I sat there with the smell of dinner cooking, and Annie squeaking and scratching away on her violin. I picked up pieces that didn’t look like they belonged together at all. I didn’t really think about it; I just held them in my hand. Something about the weight and feel of each piece in my hand told me where to put it. Each time I was rewarded with that nice little snap as I fitted each piece into its place. It was immensely relaxing, satisfying. Something like I imagined the practice of meditation to be, although that’s one thing I’ve never gotten around to trying.
Sarah and I worked in companionable silence. She’s a striking child, with golden skin and startling green eyes. Both Annie and Rachel are a warm brown, like Sammy. They all three have different fathers. I studied the girls out of the corner of my eyes, and kept working on the puzzle. I thought, I’ll never figure out all the pieces of Sammy. The woman who carefully constructed the life going on around me, with the comfortable apartment and the good meals and the music lessons and all those books, bore these three children to three different men. Men who apparently have no place in Sammy’s life now, because I’ve never heard any of them mentioned. By Sammy, anyway; I’d not been above asking Sarah one evening when we were alone together, only to find out they each had a different father whom they knew but didn’t see much. I was afraid to ask more, afraid that she’d realize how interested I was and mention it to Sammy who had managed to avoid giving anything away. Not a clue. As if it isn’t important.
Of course, I blindly dismissed the possibility that she still saw the girls’ fathers. On the nights I wasn’t there, maybe they visited their daughters, and chatted with Sammy, and who knows, maybe even slept with her. Maybe they were better lovers than I was. Maybe one of them was the true love of her life. Still, I refused to consider it. Because if this were all true, would I have had cause to complain? No. Sammy would not have betrayed me. She would not have broken any promises, explicit or otherwise.
She had not told me a thing about these men. Not a thing. This is the same Sammy who is wild in bed with me, the best lover I ever had, who makes me feel that there are no limits, no boundaries, ever, anywhere. But I was afraid she could take away my fairy dust and dump me back on earth. Dump me hard.
When we finished the puzzle, Annie and I set the table. It had sort of become my regular chore. Sarah put the napkins around, but Annie claimed she put them on the wrong side, and Sarah said she didn’t, and Annie said Sarah was stupid. Elena said that name calling wasn’t allowed and sent Annie to her room. When Annie came back she apologized, and Rachel spilt her milk. Around all this, we were eating a casserole that Sammy had put together that morning, when one of her patients had called to report mild, irregular contractions. Sammy had had a feeling that the woman would be in hard labor by the afternoon. She’d started cooking and she had called me to let me know that she wouldn’t be able to say goodbye in person. She’d be midwifing.
I can’t compete with the commencement of a new life on earth, either.
After we ate, I looked at my watch and said I had to go. They all said goodbye, and have a safe trip and come back soon. I felt really nervous and started backing towards the door, still awkward about initiating hugs. Then Rachel started after me and threw her arms around my knees, crying “Up-ee, up-ee.” I picked her up and hugged her. I saw too late that she had tomato sauce on her hands and now it was smeared all over the front of my shirt, a tight, gold-colored, Lycra body shirt. I kissed her dark, crinkly hair, and hugged her and put her down. Then I got the hell out of there, while the getting was good.
The flight down was uneventful enough. I had brought some books stuffed in my shoulder bag, but I didn’t read them. It doesn’t seem right to me to read too much on a plane. Oh, the in-flight magazine would be all right, if you could stand it, or maybe a
People
purchased from the magazine shop in the airport specifically for the occasion. But how could it be safe to concentrate on something good, to really get into reading something, when you’re in a little cylinder of metal hurtling through the air? Flight is a form of levitation, after all. Seems like all that concentration might interfere with the pilot’s, or maybe it’s the navigator’s, brain waves. I bought a couple of drinks instead, just to slow down my brain waves and do my part toward cooperating with the flight crew’s vibrations.
I stared out the window at the cotton-candy clouds beneath us, and thought about what I was doing. At first, it was mainly profound thoughts like “What the hell am I doing?” Then, after a while, without meaning to, I started organizing it all in my head, everything I knew, and what Sammy had told me. I started to get a picture, or more like a feeling, for what I was doing. It was like one of my articles, a story I was investigating, and I knew that I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had a tale worth telling about Elijah Wilson to take back to Sammy.
What else
could
I give Sammy. Except my body, of course, but, hey, I’d given that out like some cheap party favor in my time. I had a feeling that Sammy thought she was giving me a taste of family life, and stability, some kind of special warmth and love she thought emanated from the life she lived. Kind of like I was a stray she was taking in.
I got a lot of good meals at her place, but it’s not like New York City isn’t full of good restaurants. And even though I’m not much of a cook, I am an expert at city food. The best hot dog, the best knish, cheap Indian food, pain au chocolate, fresh bread in any of a hundred varieties—I knew where to find it all. So it’s not like I was starving or eating out of cans when I met her.