The Importance of Being Dangerous (19 page)

“How'd you do it?” Aunt Chickie asked from her seat in the corner of the living room sofa. “You had got so fat, Sidarra.”

Sidarra kept trying on the new clothes. Tonight was the first night they'd ever used the fireplace without the whole house smoking up by accident. It was also a good time to try on her new clothes. At the dining room table down at the other end of the floor, Raquel crouched over her homework and hardly moved. “I was depressed.”

“For four, five years?”

Sidarra, wearing only her bra on top and a skirt, turned for a second, shot Aunt Chickie a look, and went back to adjusting a skirt. “There's a time limit? I don't think so. It started before I lost them and got much worse afterward. I'm doin' the best I can. That's all I can do.”

“I'm not criticizing. I'm just remembering. Look at you now, girl. That skin allergy you complained about looks almost gone to me.”

“Almost. Thanks for noticing.”

“Your figure,” Aunt Chickie continued, “that's what you call svelte. I didn't wanna say nothing at the time, but, Lord, Sidarra, you were fat.” She finally pressed the on button on the remote
control she had been holding. The large-screen TV popped on, but it was still too far away for her old eyes to see well. She squinted and sat a little forward on the couch, but it didn't seem to make much difference. “You're taking care of your own self. The only way to go. The
only
one.”

“Got that right.”

“That one's very nice, Sidarra. Very elegant,” she pointed to the blouse. Firelight from the artificial log glowed on their brown skin.

“Yeah, I like it too.”

“So you ain't ever gonna marry that Michael fella then?”

Raquel immediately put down her pencil and listened in. When she wasn't sure if she could hear over the TV, she got up and tiptoed closer to the wide doorway. Sidarra caught her in the corner of her eye.

“Baby, you should finish your homework upstairs in your room,” Sidarra said. “Aunt Chickie's watching television now, and you need to concentrate.”

“I'm just about finished.”

“Well, go on up and finish, child,” Aunt Chickie added. “We'll be here when you get it all done correctly.”

They waited for her to gather her books and papers and head up the stairs.

“That's sort of the question, isn't it? But I'm pretty sure I've known the answer for a while now, Chickie. Michael's a good man. He's kind and he tries to look out for me.” She stopped talking, walked quietly to the foot of the stairs in her stocking feet, and looked straight up into her daughter's eyes. “What's the matter? You got a water bug in your room, young lady?”

Busted, Raquel just nodded yes, went to her room and shut the door.

Sidarra pointed upstairs and whispered, “If anything,
she's
the reason Michael's still around. They really get along.” Sidarra
pulled some fishnet stockings out of a bag, looked at her aunt, and decided to put them back.

“Please do me a favor, Sidarra, and don't waste your precious time on perfection,” Aunt Chickie said. “That's why I'm living downstairs and not in some fine suburban house. No offense.”

Sidarra looked surprised. “I always thought it was love. I always kind of admired that about you, you know? That you'd fallen in love, been in love, and when you lost that love, you were gonna keep holding out for love.”

“Same thing. But it was quite different then. I look at y'all nowadays and I'm afraid it's hard to see how any of you ever fall in love. I'm not so sure you all know what being in love is, so concerned about, what is it, ‘making bank'?”

Sidarra finished tying her robe and sat down to face the fire. “Well, I'm in love,” she told the flames.

“That's nice,” Aunt Chickie smiled softly.

“It's taken me a while to realize it. It's not a perfect situation. But he's as much perfection as I care to know.”

Aunt Chickie grew attentive. “Does he love you back?”

“Think so.”

“Who is it?”

“The man at the party. Griff.”

“I
knew
it!” She mashed her fist on her knee. “Yup. That's a problem. Wish I had some advice.”

“That's okay. I'll work it out.”

Aunt Chickie's eyes returned to the silent TV screen, but the expression on her face looked irritated. After a long pause, she opened her mouth to speak. “I'm just wondering something, Sidarra.” Sidarra stopped what she was doing. “Assuming you could, what makes it okay to take this man from that woman?”

Sidarra thought for a moment and looked up at her aunt. “I deserve him,” she said.

“Well, you're not the first,” she sighed. “Just be careful, Si
darra, would you? People have a way of thinking the only vows to take serious are their own.”

 

MEANWHILE
,
IN HIS ROOM
surrounded by the crusts of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Yakoob confronted Fidelity Investments' firewall for the first time as a customer. It was not just that he truly wanted to go back and get Heidi's real name (Marissa Arpel). It was that, after many days of dedicated attempts, he couldn't hack past the firewall. It surprised him that he couldn't quite put himself in the mind of the bank's programmers. Yakoob had always been able to find the field that revealed the code that opened the database where the good numbers lived. But this couldn't be unveiled without a password. At least not in the time he had.

So several weeks after his successive Whiteboy runs of the Amistad, Koob found himself back at the Fidelity reception desk, his new account application filled out, sitting at George Cavanaugh's desk, angrily biting down on his own jaw. This time he carried just $1,000 in money orders, which he said he wanted to put into a Fidelity money market that he could write checks off of. And he wanted online banking. Koob was no longer afraid or intimidated or ambitious. He never thought of his mother once. Marilyn never knew about the visit. He used their home address but not his real name, and fake IDs. His poor penmanship didn't bother him enough to hide it.

Cavanaugh was not a bastard about their brief meeting. Pleasant enough, he just didn't see Yakoob as completely a man yet, it seemed, but someone in between. Koob could tell this by the low expectations from which his questions came, the busy but charitable tone talking down to him. And as he listened and occasionally answered without the slightest inflection, Koob imagined the man before him crying at his home somewhere, with his wife of a
million years distraught beside him, having just gotten the final news that the bank had completed its investigation. After twenty-five years, it was firing him. That he better clear out his mahogany desk immediately and hire a lawyer, because there were probably going to be charges brought. And maybe, just maybe, this man could hang it up—his prospects of ever working for another bank, his pension, and his name—all because one day he looked out at the waiting area and mistook a black man in blue for someone who didn't matter.

THE FACT THAT AUNT CHICKIE'S REACTION
to Sidarra's confession of love combined careful indifference with a killjoy warning was further proof that she deserved Griff. Sidarra deserved Griff because her own mother would never again react with the excitement and celebration love's arrival demands. And Sidarra would never witness the great meeting she'd always envisioned between her father and the man she'd choose as second best on earth. For the same reason, Sidarra deserved nice clothes, a great brownstone, and a healthy daughter. All of these were not conscious understandings yet. But without her mother and father's love, she discovered, her just desserts in life might never again come unconditionally. She would have to go out and find them, even take them. This too was the continuing work of grief, a kind of soul's work she could get tired of, it occurred to her, as she drove up the Henry Hudson Parkway in her sky blue Mercedes, listening to
Aretha sing for the river beside her and trying to reach the Christmas pageant at Raquel's new school on time. Sidarra deserved two chemical peels to remove the last layer of a three-month descent into disfigurement—and the dermatologist visit early that morning, too. She probably deserved the Mercedes as consolation for pityriasis rosea. She deserved Griff because it was Christmas. But all that would remain inside. There was no one left to tell about her jones. All she could think about were his hands.

 

ST. AUGUSTINE'S WAS AN OLD RAMBLING STONE
building set on a campus that overlooked the Hudson River at the northern tip of Manhattan. By five o'clock, it was bathed in evening sunset. The school was so affluent that Raquel still qualified for a generous financial aid package; its parents were so leisurely that getting to the leafy edge of the island by five o'clock caused no problems at work. When Sidarra reached the parking lot and found a space, her Mercedes joined several others, some Lexus's, Land Rovers, and BMWs that had already arrived. She walked up the gentle, bush-lined path to the main entryway with other parents. The idyllic setting contrasted with the dry faces of serious strangers. With the exception of a few black parents and a few more Latinos, nearly everyone was white. They had name charts of the children hanging on bulletin boards outside the auditorium, and though it's hard to tell a Catholic name, very few people seemed to be Catholic. When the parents were seated and the little show began, most of the biblical references and Catholic twists seemed to sail right over the heads of the audience, including Sidarra's. This was Aunt Chickie's point about “making bank” put another way. Nowadays, you didn't need to be in love or even understand the religion behind the membership as long as being in the membership brought all the other blessings of a good life. In this case, that membership cost about $18,000 a year, depending on the grade.
Attending the religious ritual in a room that looked a lot like a church was just another deposit on your membership dues, not a sign of surrender.

Boys from the brother school across the way joined the girls for the production. Once the show started, the cuteness was suffocating. Raquel only had a part in the chorus, but the other little actors were doing their adorable best to get their lines out, be Jesus, and pretend like they knew how to be somebody from two thousand years ago. There were more chuckles than applause for the third and fourth graders. Sidarra stopped counting the other lone mothers sitting in the rows. All she could see was her daughter's bright shining teeth in her wide-open mouth singing as hard as she could.

“Mommy!” Raquel screamed when she spotted her from the edge of the stage at the end of the show. Sidarra jostled her way among the excited parents to get to her kid.

“You were wonderful!” Sidarra cooed into her ear as she held her up and kissed all over her face. “That was just great. Mommy's very proud of you.”

“We didn't make any mistakes at all!” Raquel beamed as they started up the aisle holding hands. “Not one.”

“Everybody was great. You all did a great job. Hey!” Sidarra suddenly called out. A little red-haired boy running full blast through the tangle of kids and parents had slammed into Raquel's back on his way to his waiting parents. If Sidarra hadn't been holding her, Raquel would have been knocked to the floor. The boy didn't even turn around. Sidarra looked down to check on Raquel, whose triumphant expression had gone crestfallen as she rubbed her shoulder. “You okay, darling?”

“Yeah. I'll be all right.”

Sidarra took her by the hand and they hurriedly made their way through the crowd to the top of the aisle where the little boy was talking excitedly to his parents. Sidarra interrupted.

“Excuse me, but did you see what your child just did to my little girl?” she asked.

The parents looked at her like the intrusion she was, then at each other in momentary disbelief. “I beg your pardon,” the father said with a sharp hint of irritation in his voice. “We're talking to our son right now.” The mother returned to hear the story her son was recounting.

“He just ran up from behind us and knocked her down!” Sidarra continued.

Silence. The boy looked up at his parents, who were not particularly moved. “It's not my fault. She wouldn't get out of the way.”

That response was good enough for his parents. The father shrugged and turned his full attention back to the boy. Raquel began to move behind her mother. “It was crowded. He was excited to see us,” said the mother. Her face looked so cold. She finally glanced at Raquel. “She looks okay.”

The answer to Belinda's not-so-stupid question about why an educator like Sidarra never put her child in a private school had much to do with her anticipation of moments like these. It was true she had had opportunities to put Raquel in a more challenging place with more dedicated teachers and more stimulating materials. She knew what a wasteland so many public school classrooms were. But her efforts to move Raquel before were hindered by independent school admissions requirements, money, a lack of spots in lesser but closer Catholic schools, and other things she'd never say out loud. Like dealing with wealthy white parents and the sneers on their faces. From a distance, you can imagine a lot worse than what's true. Up close all of a sudden, this was quite true.

“What's your name, boy?” Sidarra snapped down at him. Her tone stunned the child, as if he'd never heard such a sound.

“Wait just a minute—” his mother started.

“I asked you what's your name, kid? Now answer me!”

“Nicholas,” he whispered, clutching his mother's leg.

“Nicholas,” Sidarra said sternly, “this is my daughter Raquel. If I hear that you
ever
lay a hand on Raquel again,
I
will be back to deal with you so quickly that your parents won't have a chance to cover for your rudeness. Understand?”

Nicholas ducked out of sight behind his mother. His father jumped in. “Who the hell do you think you are to threaten my son?”

Sidarra looked fiercely into his eyes. “The same mother who will deal out some necessary parenting if he touches my daughter again. Now, don't make me ask you
your
name. Come, sweetie, let's go.”

She grabbed Raquel by the hand and led her past them to the door. They did not follow as quickly as Sidarra feared they might. She and a visibly embarrassed Raquel walked back down the path through the chilly evening air. Moments later, Sidarra could hear the parents' raised voices as they argued with a school administrator.

“You shouldn't have done that, Mommy,” Raquel said in a cowed voice.

“Why the hell not? That rude boy pushed you. You're not to be pushed even if I'm not around.”

“But he's rich, Mom. That's Nick Mathews. He was the star of the pageant. And he's really, really rich.”

Sidarra could not believe her ears. “So you think if a person's rich, he can have his way, do whatever he wants to do, push whoever he wants to push, even you?”

Raquel was quiet. The expression on her face showed she was dealing with a lot of thought traffic coming from several different directions at once. “I don't know. It depends.”

Sidarra stopped them and leaned down into Raquel's face. “Take your finger out of your mouth, sugar. Listen to me. What you just said is ridiculous. There's no such thing as ‘depends' when somebody is touching your body, okay? Nobody gets to do that. I
don't care how rich they are. Rich doesn't mean you can hurt other people. You don't get to buy your way out of the rules. That's crazy. You just don't.”

Raquel seemed only half convinced. The school administrator walked up to them quickly after finishing with the boy's family. Sidarra heard her shoes on the asphalt and looked up expecting to go another round.

“Hi,” said a short, chubby woman with a kind smile and a close-cropped nun's hairdo. “I'm Miss Horn, the librarian. I don't believe we've met before.” They shook hands pleasantly. “How are ya, Raquel?”

“Fine, Miss Horn,” Raquel mumbled with her finger back in her mouth.

“You sang beautifully today.” Miss Horn turned to Sidarra. “Her voice is so lovely, she sometimes carries the chorus. We're so glad to have her here.” Sidarra was waiting for the other shoe to drop. “I just wanted to meet you in person and to apologize for Nick's roughness. We think it's unacceptable. Sometimes parents have a hard time hearing that, but I wanted to be sure to apologize to you on behalf of the school. Raquel shouldn't be distracted from her fine performance, and we're so glad you could make it up here this evening.”

Sidarra wondered exactly where she was. This could not be New York City anymore. “Well, thank you for saying that, Miss Horn. We were just discussing what happened back there…” Sidarra didn't know what else to add. The woman kept looking up kindly at her.

After the awkward pause Miss Horn asked Sidarra, “So have you signed up Raquel for the ski trip to Vermont? It's just a few weeks away.”

“Oh yeah, Mommy.” Raquel's eyes brightened again. “Can I go?”

“
May
I go,” Miss Horn corrected. Sidarra had obviously heard
nothing about a ski trip. “I wear several hats here at St. Augustine's,” Miss Horn giggled. “I'm the librarian, the new diversity coordinator,
and,
this year, I'm responsible for planning the annual ski trip. It's really great fun for the children and very well supervised.” She could see unmistakable doubt crossing Sidarra's face. Miss Horn lowered her voice in case other parents could hear her. “In the past, St. Augustine's didn't offer such things. Now, it's part of our efforts to provide the same kinds of experiences that parents pay independent schools to provide. But, to be candid, since we began the trips a few years ago, our students of color—and I'm afraid we're losing more of them to tuition increases each year—well, they just don't tend to come.”

“Hmm,” Sidarra sighed, pretending to think about it. “Is it covered by tuition?”

“Oh no. I'm afraid not. But it's a terrific bargain at only eleven hundred dollars this year.”

“How 'bout it, Mommy? I've never been skiing before,” Raquel chirped.

“Well, I'll need to think about it,” Sidarra lied, “but it's not likely this year.”

“Oh, c'mon, Mommy!”

Sidarra looked down at Raquel's creased eyebrows. “Oh, honey,” Sidarra said, “we're gonna need to go home now and take care of what's bothering your eyebrows.” She turned back to Miss Horn and smiled. “It was a pleasure meeting you. You all have done a real nice job with the pageant.”

Sidarra didn't want to say a word until she and Raquel had safely navigated their way out of the twist of suburban-type roads and back onto the familiar Henry Hudson Parkway.

“Raquel, I want you to listen to me. Don't ever crease up your face at me like that, not in front of other people, not anytime, understand?”

“I want to go on the ski trip,” she declared.

“Wait a minute. Are you listening to me?”

“No. Not unless you sign me up for the trip.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

“Uncross your arms!” she shouted. Raquel reluctantly complied. “Have you lost your mind talking to me that way? Is your hair red all of a sudden?”

Raquel thought about that one for a minute before answering. “Why not, Mom? Tell me why not.
You
bought a whole building, a car, lots of nice clothes—you buy everything. Why can't I go skiing? It doesn't make any sense. I wanna go.
You
said we were comfortable. Well, then how come we're pretending to be poor just 'cause I want to try out skiing with my friends?”

Sidarra's knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. She hit the power button on the window, waited for it to roll down, and spit outside. Then she waited for the glass to roll back up. “Now, you shut up, Raquel! You just shut your mouth until we get home.”

Unfortunately for Raquel, the worst thing about a jones caged too long inside can be the nastiness it might dish out without warning.

 

GRIFF AND BELINDA LIVED IN A RENOVATED BROWNSTONE
on Mount Morris Park, one of the first parts of Harlem to see gentrification. The building had five stories. The top two floors were rented out to tenants, while Griff and Belinda kept the first three for themselves. The parlor floor was immaculate common ground, containing the kitchen, dining room, a small study whose walls were stacked floor to ceiling with bookshelves, and a front room used almost exclusively for company. There was almost never company. In fact, the house suited the marriage well, which might have been one reason Belinda demanded they buy it. Having three
floors allowed her de facto run of the third floor and its master bedroom suite. Griff mostly lived and slept on the ground floor.

With Belinda's late hours as an investment banker, they used the parlor floor for little more than spats, quarrels, and arguments. They almost never ate dinner together or breakfast. A maid came in once a week, so they didn't clean up together. Lately that had changed, as Belinda warmed to Griff's willingness and ability to bring home some real money. One night in the living room they found themselves in the awkward position of talking breezily, even laughing, and then, feeling the rare rub of horniness, almost having sex on a leather couch they once purchased for that purpose. But tonight, three simmering issues made them return to fighting form on the parlor floor.