There was a long silence, and when I looked up, Rebecca was staring out the window again, her back straight, her shoulders shaking. “Why don't you just leave other people's business alone? Why you gotta be so mean, anyway?”
Seventeen
WE DIDN'T SPEAK FOR A WEEK. MA AND MARION LEFT us alone, prodded Rebecca with questions about the baby and me with questions about school. Our answers were monosyllabic between questions, our meals were silent. One night I turned from the television to catch Ma staring at the two of us, sitting far away from each other. She called me into the den.
“How was school today?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said, playing with the frames she had above her computer. All the pictures were of me at different stagesâcrawling, walking, eating, kindergarten graduation.
“What's going on out there?” Ma asked, gently pulling my hands into her own.
“Nothing,” I said, too casually. “You know how people get when they're pregnant.”
“Oh?” Ma cocked an eyebrow, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “How's that?”
“Crabby about things,” I said.
“You two going to work it out?”
I shrugged. “Guess so. She doesn't get in my way and I won't get in hers.”
“Well, I guess I'll let you handle this yourselves. No need for me to come between friends, is there?”
“We're not friends!” I said.
Ma let go of my hands and pulled one of my braids.
“I'll let you two handle it,” she said again.
I stormed into the living room and sat on the couchâas far away from Rebecca as I could get.
“I don't want to watch any stupid pregnancy exercise junk,” I said.
Saying nothing, Rebecca picked up both remotes, clicked off the VCR, and flipped through the channels. She stopped at a show on public television about dolphins. The man speaking was saying that there was a chance dolphins might be as smart as humans. He stared into the screen as he said this, and his blue eyes bored holes into us. Then a woman came on, promising they'd continue the show after they had collected another thousand dollars and pleading with us to call in and pledge money. I sneaked a look at Rebecca, and although her eyes were glued to the screen, they did not stop there, but moved on past it into a place I couldn't see.
“I think maybe the baby is dying,” she said.
The words echoed off the TV woman's soft pleading and settled in my stomach. I was not sure whether or not Rebecca was talking to me, but felt I should answer anyway.
“Why do you think that?”
When Rebecca finally answered, her voice was soft, clear, and full of sadness.
“He used to move around so much, and now he doesn't hardly move at all.”
“Maybe it's because you're exercising and doing schoolwork with Bernadette and everything. Maybe he's just tired.”
Rebecca shook her head. “It's not that,” she said. “He knows.”
“Knows what?” I asked quietly. In a minute the man and the dolphins would be back on. I didn't want Rebecca to stop talking. I had missed her.
“He knows we're not in Harlem no more and that he's going to go live with somebody that's not really his mother.”
“Don't worry, Rebecca. It's going to be okay.” I was unsure. I had not thought much about what would happen when the baby came and Rebecca went home again. Nor had I thought about the baby actually being born. That had all seemed like such a long time away. But now, Rebecca had been here more than a month, and the baby would be here in another six weeks. Then Rebecca would stay a little while longer and that would be the end. “Don't worry, Rebecca,” I said again, because I didn't know what else to say.
“The doctor says he's healthy, but I know that's not true. I try to eat good, and I talk to him at night. I whisper so I don't wake you up. And he used to kick a little to let me know he heard every word. But he doesn't do that no more. He hardly kicks at all now. And yesterday I was bleeding a little. You know what that means?”
I shook my head, but Rebecca was staring at the screen and didn't see me. “No.”
“You not supposed to bleed when you're pregnant. It means something is real wrong inside.”
“Maybe he's just sleeping more.”
The man and the smart dolphins came back on the screen, and Rebecca watched the dolphins jump through hoops and sing dolphin songs. The man said dolphins laugh like humans and understand stuff. He said dolphins cry.
Rebecca rubbed her stomach. Her face had gotten chub-bier, and the short curls had grown down over her eyes. She chewed a hangnail as she watched.
“Monday, Marion's taking me to Dr. Greenberg again so she can listen to the baby's heart. She says if I want, she'll tell me whether it's a boy or girl. I told her don't tell me.”
“You think there's a teeny-tiny chance it might be a girl?”
“Nope,” Rebecca said stubbornly. “Danny's calling me tomorrow.”
I wondered why she was telling me all of this.
“He's going to call around three-thirty. You want to show me around Seton some more after I get off the phone, or are you afraid to be seen with me without your ma and Marion?”
“I don't care about being seen with you. I don't care what people think.”
“Then you'll show me? I've seen a lot of buildings and I wondered what they were.”
“I'll show you.”
“Now we're friends again, right?” Rebecca turned to me for the first time that evening. She smiled and her dimples cut deeply into her cheeks, making her look a lot younger than fifteen.
“Yeah, we're friends, I guess.”
“You really think dolphins are as smart as humans?” I asked when the man promised to show us a dolphin giving birth.
Rebecca stared at the screen. The fund-raising woman came back on, asking for another thousand, and Rebecca got up and switched the television off. She pulled the elastic waistband down below her belly before she sat down again. “I think that stupid man is lying,” she said. “He knows dolphins are way smarter than any human!”
Eighteen
WHEN DANNY CALLED SATURDAY, I DID MY BEST NOT to eavesdrop but still couldn't help overhearing snatches of the conversation.
“Ma and I talk almost every day, so you don't have to give me the lowdown on the whole neighborhood,” Rebecca said into the phone from the upstairs hallway. From the living room, where I sat waiting for her, I could hear her clearly if I listened real hard.
“She told me Nikki was pregnant now but she's not gonna have it.” There was a long pause. “She too young to be having babies anyway,” Rebecca said softly.
Five minutes later, after what seemed like a hundred I-love-you's and other corny stuff, she hung up and we were on our way.
For six blocks the back of my throat burned with the question I had been dying to ask her for a long time. Rebecca chatted on and on about Danny and her friends in Harlem. She compared the brownstones in West Harlem with the small houses along the side streets in Seton. She laughed at the names of thingsâHallerton Five and Dime, Beagle Road, Window Tree Laneâand told me stories about her brothers and sisters.
“Now, Bobo and Shaunney, they're identical twins,” she said about the youngest in her family. “We used to make Shaunney wear a green ribbon around his wrist so we could tell them apart. Sometimes they'd switch and Bobo would wear the ribbon. Confuse everybody in the house except Ma.”
“Who would name their kid Bobo?”
“His real name is Elwood, but we gave him that nickname. All the kids get nicknames in HarlemâBobo, Boo-boo, CeeCee, Little Man.”
“Who names them?”
“Anybody. People down the street, upstairs from you. Next-door neighbors. They say, âNow, who he look like? Don't he favor Leon's grandson, Bud? Come here, Li'l Bud.' And the next thing you know, that's your nickname.”
“What was your nickname?”
Rebecca looked embarrassed.
“Come on,” I said. “I won't tell anybody.”
“Swear?”
“Cross my heart, hope to die.” I drew a cross on my chest with my index finger and pointed it toward heaven.
“Stinky,” she whispered.
“Stinky! Why'd they name you something like that?”
Rebecca shrugged, but I knew she knew the answer.
We laughed for nearly a block, until the tears streaming down our faces came close to freezing.
At the corner of Agauma and Seventh Street I took a deep breath, shoved my hands in my pockets, and looked at her.
“How come you decided to have the baby?” I asked.
Rebecca looked at me like she had been waiting a month and a half for this question. “I didn't tell anybody I was pregnant,” she said, pulling her scarf closer to her throat. “I knew it, but I was real, real scared. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. So I just kept it hidden. It was easy because I always wear baggy clothes anyway.”
“How'd Clair finally find out?”
“She walked in on me in the bathroom. By then I was something like five and a half months. Man . . . my ma hit the roof in four different directions, she was so mad.”
“Then what happened?”
Rebecca looked down at the cracks in the sidewalks. “Then we both started crying. Me sitting there in the bathtub, Ma sitting on the toilet. We just cried and cried and cried. Like everything we ever had was all gone.”
“That must have been real scary.”
She shook her head. “By then I wasn't scared no more. I was just sorry for what I had done and real sorry for hurting Ma.”
“Didn't you and Danny ...” I hesitated. “Didn't you have any . . . you know . . . like condoms or something?”
Rebecca shook her head again. “We were planning to get something. We were going to go to the free clinic down on St. Marks Place and stuff. But we had taken chances before and nothing happened. I guess we thought we could just take another chance. It was stupid.”
“That's too bad,” I said.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Rebecca said, sounding old and convinced.
We walked a long way in silence, pictures of Rebecca and Clair crying in the bathroom popping in and out of my head.
Nineteen
THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF SHACKS IS THE SMALL STRETCH of land clear across the back roads of Seton where poor white people live. The shacks are small tin and tar houses with roofs slanting toward the street. The shacks' windows are holes cut into the tin and filled with plastic. Before the poor families settled into them years ago, they had been the homes of squatters and coal miners, people passing through Seton with no plans to stay. Where the shacks stop, behind the high hills that curve around to hide them, black doctors and lawyers and bankers and public-relations people settled. With their families they hid themselves away from the shacks. A lot of kids in my neighborhood have never seen the back roads, or, as they call them, the shack roads. School buses stay down in the valleys on the other side or take the roads up on the hills, so that if you're riding in one and look down, all you see is the slanted line of houses. Not the littered streets. Not the half-naked kids with dirty necks. Not the stray animals turning over garbage cans.
We stumbled on the neighborhood of shacks by accident. We had been touring Seton all day. I'd shown Rebecca the stores, Roper Academy, the gardens. But it was Saturday and Roper Academy was cold red boring stone. Closed. The gardens were flat with ice and snow, stretching for a mile and a half. Rebecca had grown restless quickly, and it was then that we saw himâa pale little boy in a ragged coat who couldn't have been more than four years old.
“He must've gotten lost,” Rebecca said, moving toward him.
“He probably didn't,” I said. “Kids around here walk around like that. They look for junk in the garbage cans.”
“How's some mother gonna let a kid that small out in this cold weather to look in garbage cans? Answer me that!”
I shrugged, walking briskly to keep up with her. “That's the way the people are around here.”
“You sound like a snob! A kid's a kid.”
“I don't like it over here, Rebecca. I'm going back.”
“You scared of this side of town? Is this what you were afraid to show me?”
“Of course not. It's just dirty. It smells funny over here.”
A girl came out from one of the shacks and started walking toward us. Her dirty blond hair hung limply above her shoulders, and the side of her pale face was streaked as though, busy with a more important task, she had dragged a dirty hand across it to scratch an itch.
“Jason! Jason-Eliot. You get over here now, boy!”
“Mama!” the boy screamed, running over to the girl.
Rebecca froze. The girl couldn't have been more than fifteen.
She held on to the boy and stared at me through half-closed eyes. I was wearing the leather bomber jacket I had gotten last Christmas. She looked at the sleeves, at the suede collar, at the wool pants I wore beneath it. Her stare stopped at my boots, made its way up to my jacket again, and stopped again somewhere just below my nose, more hate in her eyes than I have ever seen. The ragged child beside her put his thumb in his mouth and wrapped his other arm around her legs.
“You don't live around here,” she said to me. “There's no coloreds livin' over 'cross this side.”
“Coloreds!” Rebecca laughed. “I haven't heard that since
Roots.
” She looked around, then looked back at the girl and down at the little boy. “Thank God we don't,” she said, glaring at the girl. “We just brought your baby back.”