We Are Water. Wally Lamb
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can that Minnie uses for an ashtray. Neither of us spoke until we’d each started second cigarettes. That was when she told me about her ten-year-old son, Africa. She’s a single mother. It’s been three years since Africa’s father left, she says, and he’s never paid her one single dime for child support.
Minnie drinks on the job, too. She doesn’t know I know. The other night, I dropped an egg on the kitchen floor, and when I went into the cleaning closet to get something to wipe it up, I found a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano wine hidden at the bottom of a box of rags, mop heads, and vacuum cleaner attachments. It was half full. And when I checked it the following night after she left to go home, it was only a quarter full. The night after that, there was a new jug—Carlo Rossi burgundy this time. She had finished the other bottle and drunk three or four inches’ worth from the new one. Well, as long as she gets her work done and Viveca doesn’t find out, let her drink. Maybe I have Carlo Rossi to thank for the fact that she’s been more open lately. Maybe it’s not so much that she’s begun to trust me as it is because she’s buzzed.
Minnie has medical expenses because of Africa’s asthma, and she’s trying to save enough to relocate to an apartment where there’s no mold. She’d like to get her teeth fixed, too, she told me, so she can find herself another boyfriend. Africa’s father got remarried, she says. “His new wifey LaRue gonna have triplets is what LaRue’s cousin told me on the low,” she said. “Darnell don’t even know ’bout them babies yet, but I do. Well, he in for a big surprise. Serve him right. That man loves his sleep better than anything ’cept hisself—lookin’ at the mirror all the time so he can see how pretty he is. I hope them three babies all get colic and keep him up nights. He won’t look so pretty then. He be runnin’ away from that mirror.” She chuckled at the thought of Darnell’s sleep deprivation in the same way she chuckles when the black women fight each other on Jerry Springer. Then she snuffed out her cigarette, stood, and said she didn’t suspect “Missuz’s furniture gonna dust itself.” I admire Minnie’s flinty bitterness, and the fact that, whenever I give her extra cash, she takes it without acting beholden or even grateful. “Our little secret”: it’s like a contract between the two of us.
Minnie and her boy live in Newark. Africa’s sickly but “sweet as sugar.” For the past two years, she’s paid a Spanish boy down the hall to babysit Africa in the morning “but he growin’ hisself a mustache and gettin’ some attitude lately.” Puberty’s apparently made him less dependable. “He spoze to show up befo’ I leave for work. Fix Africa his breffest, make sure he gots his homework and his inhaler, then walk him to school. But half the time, I gotta go befo’ he come so I don’t miss my bus, and then I gotta call and call his cell phone to see if he there yet so Africa don’t have to walk hisself to school and do his work all mornin’ long with nothin’ in his stomach until hot lunch. I probly gon’ have to fire Oswaldo’s ass pretty soon, but I ain’t done it yet.”
Yesterday Minnie told me she has two grown sons by another man. Twins, Ronald and Donald. Donald is doing time in upstate New York—for what she didn’t say and I didn’t ask. “But Ronald never been no trouble. He come outa me first, thass why. It’s the second twin thass always the trouble chile.” Ronald is married and works at the Friendly’s ice cream plant in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, Minnie told me. “I keep axin’ him to come visit us an’ bring his kids so I can see my gran’babies. But he ain’t come yet. Thass okay, though. I understand. He busy.” When I told Minnie that I have twins, too—a daughter who runs a soup kitchen in San Francisco and a son who’s stationed at Fort Hood—she nodded indifferently. And when I told her that, when I was a kid, I had worked at a Friendly’s restaurant, she had no reaction at all. Minnie likes me well enough—not only because of the extra money I give her, I like to think—but she doesn’t seem to entertain the possibility that she and I have anything in common.
Well, why would she? She’s poor; I’m not. She’s black; I’m white. Minnie says her commute takes her almost two hours either way. After she catches an early bus out of Newark, she transfers twice, then takes the ferry from Hoboken into Manhattan. At the South Ferry station, she catches the Lexington Avenue local up to the Spring Street stop, then walks over to our apartment on Elizabeth. The trip in reverse takes longer, she says. Some nights she doesn’t return home until eight o’clock or later. My walk from our apartment to my studio space at the artists’ collective on Bleecker takes ten minutes when I don’t stop along the way, collecting sidewalk discards that I might incorporate into my art. (On trash collection day, that ten-minute walk sometimes takes me an hour or more, depending on what people have thrown out. A few weeks ago, I had such a good haul that I had to grab an abandoned shopping cart and wheel my treasures to the studio. I was going to leave the cart on the sidewalk out front, but then I lugged that up to my workplace, too.) One night when she got home, Minnie said, she put the key in the lock, opened the door, and smelled chocolate. The Spanish kid, who’s not supposed to leave Africa by himself, had done just that. Left to his own devices, Africa had gotten the bright idea to take a bath in cocoa. “He run hot water, then dump this whole big can of Swiss Miss that I got cheap at the flea market because of the gone-by date.” Minnie was headachy and dog tired, she said, and when she saw Africa sitting in all that chocolate bathwater, she beat him silly, splashing cocoa every which way. “He cryin’ so hard, he give hisself a asthma ’tack and I say, ‘Where your inhaler at?’ And he go, while he wheezin’ away, he go, ‘It in school, Mama.’ And so we end up at the emergency for two, three hour. After we get home, I put him to bed and start cleanin’ up all that mess. Seem like no mo’ than a few hours go by before I had to wake up, let Oswaldo in cuz he be bangin’ on the door—on time for once. By the time I got ready, I had to run to catch that bus.”
That’s another thing Minnie doesn’t know we have in common: that I used to hit my boy, too. Andrew, the second-born of my twins. Poor, sweet Andrew, who looked so beautiful when he slept. Who, despite those wallopings, always kept my tirades from his father. His sisters did, too. Why was that? I wonder. Were they being protective of me? Were they afraid that, if they told, I might turn my anger on them, too? Or that I’d be taken away—carted off by the authorities the way I was when I was a little girl? No, that was my fear, not theirs … Of the three kids, Andrew’s the one with the most O’Day in him. This? Oh, yeah, I fell off my bike and bumped my head on the sidewalk, Dad … Me and Jay Jay were horsing around over at his house. It’s just a black and blue mark, Dad. It’s no big deal. If I hadn’t known where those battle scars really came from, I might have believed him, too.
I didn’t want Andrew to enlist; I begged him not to. Every night before I go to bed, I get down on my knees, make the sign of the cross, and ask Jesus to please, please spare Andrew from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Sometimes I get scared that God or karma or whoever or whatever’s in charge of retribution will pay me back for the way I singled him out. Or because I walked away from my marriage. It amuses Viveca, I think, to see me praying; she doesn’t believe in God. “What is it you’re praying for?” she asked me one night, and I kept it vague. “World peace,” I said. But mostly what I beg God for is my son’s safety. Please, I pray, let me die if I have to, but spare my son. Let Andrew not have to go to either of those places and be killed.
Okay, I tell myself. If you’re not going into work again today, then do something else. It’s after eleven already. Go down to the lobby and get the mail. Check your e-mail.
Viveca’s two-day-old message is titled Mykonos! I click on it. “Here’s the villa where we’ll be staying,” it says. “Have a look.” In defiance, I decide not to open the attachment—those pictures she wants me to see … Our apartment, our housekeeper. What’s hers, Viveca often reminds me, is mine now, too. Nevertheless, while she’s away, I’m supposed to sign that prenup agreement her lawyer has drawn up. When it was hand delivered by way of messenger from Attorney Philip Liebmann’s Sixth Avenue office, Viveca said, “I told Phil it wasn’t necessary, but he was insistent. Got a little snippy with me in fact. I’ve known Phil since I was a child; he was my father’s lawyer and his tennis buddy. He feels paternal toward me, that’s all. But, sweetheart, it’s just a boring legal formality that’s going to make an overly protective old man happy. Don’t read any more into it than that.