The Love Children Read online

  Sometimes we went to the movies together, and once, when Philo was flush, he took Mom and me out to dinner. I was often included in whatever they did. Philo taught me to play chess, not that I really learned. But he tried. And he gave me books to read. There was the Marvell, and one by Richard Fariña. It was called Been Down So Long It Looks Like up to Me. I loved that book, and I fell in love with its author. Philo said he was killed in an accident soon after he published that book. Sandy met Philo one night when she was at our house for dinner, and she thought he was cute. Steve liked him too.

  One Saturday when Philo arrived, I was so happy to see him, I hugged him. He hugged me back and we talked a little bit. I sat there with him—Mom had gone to the market—and I asked him about some lines in a Marvell poem. Philo transformed himself into a kindly teacher and sat there with me patiently explaining words and syntax and talking about Marvell’s philosophy. I gazed at his beautiful face, and suddenly realized I was in love with Philo. He was talking about Milton’s Areopagitica, against censorship, which he said was really great. He pulled a book from his briefcase and began reading it aloud. It was amazing. What metaphors! I was struck by “five Imprimaturs are seen together dialoguewise in the Piazza of one Title page, complementing and ducking each to other with shav’n reverences, whether the Author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his Epistle, shall to the Presse or to the spunge.” He read the famous one “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered Vertue”—at least it was famous when I was a girl; I bet nobody knows it now. I asked if I could borrow the book. He said he needed it for a class the next day, but he’d bring me a copy if I wanted to read it through.

  Philo and Mom were going to a party that night given by somebody in the English department at Moseley. I went out too, with Steve and his friends Lonny and Beck, to a party in Roxbury. It was wild, lots of dope, and I think there was even heroin, great music on the stereo, and people dancing. I danced a few times, not that I’m good at it, or even decent. I’m uptight, repressed, Sandy would call it, but I can’t help it. Still, it was fun. I loved the people there, they were so full of life, and didn’t act fake.

  All of us were kind of hungover the next day, Mom and Philo from wine, me from all the smoke, excitement, and weed, and we lay around the house like sick dogs. In the afternoon Mom insisted we had to go for a walk, so we drove to the coast and walked on the beach at Manchester. We weren’t really allowed to walk there: the people who live in those towns reserved the beaches for themselves. Manchester was a rich town, like most of the coastal towns, and the townspeople didn’t want outsiders coming in. But Mom said no one has the right to own the beach, that it should be for all the people, and we used to sneak in. The problem was parking, but Mom would drop us off with all our gear, and then she’d drive down to the supermarket and park in their lot and walk back up. We’d never been caught except the time I brought Steve. One look at him and they knew we didn’t live there; they threw us out. But this day, we were all white and the only ones on the beach. It was winter, and we walked in the wind; I felt the wind was cleansing me. We held on to each other so the wind didn’t blow us over, and we talked and laughed and watched the gulls and the ridges in the purple sand and listened to it sing in the wind.

  The following weekend, Philo brought me another lavender book, much bigger than the Marvell, this one with Milton’s prose. It included Areopagitica, which I read all the way through. Philo explained censorship to me: I knew what the word meant, of course, but I didn’t really understand why it was important. Philo said that rulers always tried to increase their power as much as they could, by taking power away from anybody else that had it, like nobles or the clergy. The common people, of course, had no power at all. To succeed, rulers had to keep people from knowing what they were doing; if they could keep people ignorant, they would never protest, but only bow their heads. They had people say or write the story the way they wanted it known. When people got tired of lies and told the rulers they wanted a voice in their own lives, like in Milton’s time, and in the American Revolution, the rulers refused and they had to rebel. The “shav’n reverences” in Milton’s essay were priests in the Catholic Church, which censored writing in Europe so no one would question the church. Milton was telling his fellow revolutionaries not to build a society like the Catholic Church, which went on banning books and plays and even movies right into the twentieth century. What really shocked me was that the year after Milton wrote the Areopagitica, he became the head censor of England. You think when a person writes something as magnificent as Areopagitica that there would never be censorship again. But Philo told me there was censorship even here, now, in our country!

  Mom had once said that love was mean, but Philo never was. I don’t think he ever made Mom cry. She made him cry, but not by being mean. I found out about this one hot night that summer. It was stifling and we had both left our bedroom doors open, as well as the door to the screened porch downstairs. Fans in Mom’s room and mine were whirring but still I could hear Mom and Philo talking in bed. I was reading Trollope, a treasure from a trove I had found in the attic. I loved the little old books you could hold in one hand and the onionskin pages that smelled of the library, of glue and paper, that crinkled when you turned them and felt sacred. Mom’s voice was a murmur and Philo would every once in a while mumble a question. Then at one point, her voice rose a little and got thick and I could hear her sob, and I perked up, trying to hear what she was saying. I thought Philo was making Mom cry. But then she cried out, “You marry so young and live together so long, you get trained. You are educated—it’s like postgraduate work—in adapting to your partner. And if you’re married to someone who has no control over his rage, you train yourself not to react to rage, not to feel, not to respond, to stay calm and in control at all times. And that ruins you; it kills your soul! You get numb! When I met you, my feelings were dead. I couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to feel again! And I’m not sure I do!”

  I sat up sharply. Was that true? Then Mom was sobbing, and in a little while, there was a chord, another voice sobbing with her, almost in harmony with her. Philo was crying with her!

  I pictured the two of them, Philo lying across the foot of the bed the way he did when they talked, Mom leaning back against her pillows, Philo hugging her feet close to his body, then crawling up to hug her. Was she saying she didn’t love Philo? I felt like crying myself, but then I had to laugh, what a family! The family that cries together stays together?

  The sounds of that night lingered with me, and as time went on, it came to me that that was exactly what I wanted, someone who would feel with me, who would share my sorrow like that. I wondered if Steve would, or Bishop. I had never really asked much of them. I had thought before about asking Steve to give me something I needed. I knew I had given him what he needed; I became furious at our country when we talked about what happened to black people here, about the different things, terrible things that had happened to Steve and his friends. But nothing terrible had ever happened to me except my parents getting divorced, and I could hardly ask Steve to feel bad for me about that, when his mother had died when he was seven and his father didn’t even want to know him. And by now I was used to my parents being divorced and in truth I didn’t feel that bad about it anymore. Mostly what I felt bad about was Daddy, the way Daddy was. But if marrying Daddy made Mom not feel, what did it do to me to have parents who were always screaming at each other? Maybe I didn’t feel anything either.

  I was working the breakfast-and-lunch shift at Sonny’s one Saturday when Steve stopped into the restaurant around two o’clock. He asked if I wanted to go to his place after work. He said his grandmother was going to visit her cousin in Roxbury and wouldn’t be there, so I could finally see where he lived. I said sure and he hung around until my shift ended at two thirty, which really meant almost three. I didn’t want to show it, but I was very excited: I felt that this was a mark of serious trust. Steve had never ta
ken me to his apartment before; he’d never even shown me where it was.

  He drove us over toward MIT, where there were a lot of factories, nothing like Harvard. One of them was a yellow-brick twelve-story apartment building surrounded by a high chain-link fence and with a concrete yard, which looked like a prison yard, with no trees or flowers or grass. Children were playing in the yard, but they had no swings or seesaws or slide. The base of the building was covered with graffiti, most of it telling you to go fuck yourself. We opened a heavy brown door with a barred window in it and the letter Don it, entering a hall whose beige paint was almost completely obliterated by more graffiti. Garbage was scattered everywhere. There was a smell of urine and liquor and rotten food. We got on the elevator, which heaved its way up to the tenth floor. Steve held my hand all the way; I guess he knew I was nervous. It felt strange being in a place where people hate where they live so much that they scrawl “fuck you” on the walls and pee on the floor and strew garbage around. I’d read that animals never foul their own nests, so why would humans? I knew that a girl in Steve’s building had had a baby last year and thrown it down the incinerator shaft. Steve had shown me the article in the paper, saying it had happened in his building. I figured the girl must have felt like garbage herself. Did the people who lived here think they were garbage? It made me want to cry. What had to happen to people to make them feel like garbage?

  The hallways were concrete, painted light brown, the doors dark brown. Up here there wasn’t so much graffiti. Once we were inside Steve’s grandmother’s apartment, I felt better. The living room had a beige couch and two green chairs and in front of the TV was a wooden rocking chair with a beige cushion. There was an end table next to the couch and a standing lamp behind the rocker. Pictures of flowers cut from magazines were thumb-tacked to the walls, and nylon lace curtains hung at the windows. There was a statue of Jesus on the television set and a painting of him on one wall. The carpet had dark green leaves on a lighter green background. The walls were white. The color combination was nice.

  “It’s nice,” I said to Steve.

  He smiled stiffly. I felt he didn’t like my saying that. Maybe he thought I was patronizing him. Was I? Or maybe he thought I was surprised that it was nice. But I hadn’t known what to expect. He had commented on our furniture the first time he came to my house. It had never occurred to me that our furniture was beautiful, just that it was old-fashioned. But he raved about it, said it was gorgeous. No way a black person could afford to buy antique furniture like ours, he said.

  Steve’s apartment had a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. His Grandma Josie’s room had a double bed covered with a crocheted bedspread, an old bureau, a rocker, an old rag rug, and lace curtains. It was really nice, a quiet old-fashioned room where you could feel the peace. A photograph of what I guessed were her mother and father stood in a silver frame on her dresser; they looked incredibly old, wizened and nearly toothless. The boys’ room was small and crowded, with two sets of bunk beds, one against each wall. There was a window at the back wall in the narrow space between them, with a sheer nylon curtain over it, and a blue shag rug on the floor. Their storage was in four big drawers, two in the base of each bed. The beds were covered in dark blue cotton bedspreads that I wondered if his grandma had made herself; they looked handmade. She had tried. You could see that. But the room stank. Well, three boys lived in it, two younger than Steve, and there were clothes everywhere, soiled underwear and smelly socks and sneakers. Books, balls, comic books, little toy cars were scattered on the beds and floor. The closet door was open, showing coats and jeans and shirts hung precariously on crooked hangers and schoolbooks piled on the floor.

  “She does the laundry on Sunday, her day off,” Steve said, as if he was embarrassed. Then he put his arms around me. I nestled against him, but I was a little uncomfortable in that room. I couldn’t take the smell. I knew I was being snobbish, and I tried to get beyond myself. I reminded myself how terrific Steve was, what a great person, and how much I loved him. I relaxed a little.

  We lay down on his bunk, the lower one on the right. Near our feet, a ladder leaned against the upper bunk, and we stared up at the board that held the mattress above us. We were lying on a thin mattress on a board too, so the bed was very hard. Probably good for the back, I thought.

  We turned toward each other and started to kiss, and I got into it a little, I started feeling shoots of electricity, pangs, oh, I did love Steve, and he tried to slide my sweater off, and I had to help him, then we took off his sweater. He had on an undershirt and I had on a bra, and we had to get those off too. There wasn’t much room in the bunk, and we started to giggle. I grabbed him and kissed him, he was so cute. All that undressing wore us out, but we still had to get off pants, with his belt, and his underpants. Getting those off was a real project, but we finally did it, we were down to our socks, but we didn’t bother taking those off, we were hot now and pressed up against each other and our hearts were beating madly in among the clothes and I was moaning a little, and he was hard and big against my leg, and he started to pull his body up, and get on top of me, when we heard the front door open and slam shut.

  We both fell back, aghast.

  Steve looked at me, put a finger on his lips. We listened. We could hear sounds, soft and slow. Not one of the boys. Steve heaved a great sigh. He pulled up his trousers and zipped them up. He put his sweater back on. His underwear lay mixed with mine amid the sheets. He got up silently and put on his shoes. He called out, “Gram? Josie?”

  He went out into the living room and walked toward the kitchen. “Gram? What happened? Thought you were going to visit Eleanor.”

  I heard an old woman’s voice saying that Eleanor wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want company, so she just went to the grocery store. It sounded as if she was in the kitchen, putting groceries away. I could hear cupboard doors open and close. He stayed with her for a while, the two of them talking. Then she must have walked into the living room. I heard the TV switch on. I heard a body settle itself into an armchair.

  “Umm, there’s a girl in the bedroom, Gram,” Steve said. I could hear him better now they were in the next room.

  “A girl? In the bedroom?”

  “Yeah. Jess. My friend from school. I was showing her the apartment and she started to feel sick, so she lay down.”

  “Well, I can’t take care of her, Steven,” she said, sounding alarmed. “You better take her home.”

  “No, no, I know. As soon as she’s feeling better, I will.”

  “All right, boy.”

  A game show took over the living room. Steve suddenly appeared in the bedroom. He smiled at me. “How you feeling?”

  I rolled my eyes at him.

  “Better? Don’t get up till you feel better, y’hear?”

  I grimaced and felt around for my underwear. I couldn’t find my bra.

  “Where’s my bra?” I mouthed at him. He put his hand over his mouth, stifling a laugh, and came over to the bed to look around. Between us, we found it, tangled in the sheet. He helped me put it on. We found the rest of my clothes and I struggled into them, still lying there. Finally I got up. I started to make the bed.

  “Don’t bother,” he whispered.

  “A sick person would leave a bed looking like this?” I hissed into his ear.

  He laughed so hard you could hear him, and he said, out loud, “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Jess.”

  We pulled the sheet neatly over the mattress, pulled the blanket and spread up to where it might have been. Then we tried to leave the room, but Steve had to wait a minute to stop laughing and calm himself.

  We went out into the living room. “Gram, this is Jess. Jess, this is my Gramma Josie,” Steve said, smiling.

  Josie turned her head and stared at me—and froze. Her face changed, her color changed, her whole body changed. She looked at me, then at Steve. Then she turned away from us, her head moving very slowly. The image hung before me, her old worn f
ace, its grooves deep with sorrow, her eyes empty, their life gone.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, boy,” she said, tonelessly.

  We stood there, transfixed. Then Steve took my hand and led me out, and wordlessly we went back down in the elevator and got in his car, and wordlessly he drove me home.

  My senior year I waited tables at the café, but only breakfasts and lunches. Sonny wanted guys to work the dinner shift; he thought it was classier, and of course the guys liked it because dinner had the best tips. I was always off after three and often shopped for my family. I tried to buy things I knew Philo liked. Mom and I liked almost everything, but Philo didn’t—he was used to a different diet and he didn’t care much for unusual vegetables or fish or salads, so we reserved them for nights he wasn’t there. His mother was a wonderful cook, he said, and she cooked the specialties of her own country, spicy meatballs he couldn’t describe beyond to say they were delicious, and chicken or veal with paprika.

  “Ummm,” Mom said, “can you get me the recipes?”

  He looked at her falteringly.

  “Just ask your mother. Jot them down. I’d love to try them.”

  He sat there blinking.

  “Philo! What’s the matter? Is that so hard?”

  “She won’t give them to me,” he finally wrenched out.