How Stella Got Her Groove Back (34 page)

“Up north. In the Bay Area.”

“I do too. Where exactly?”

“Right past Walnut Creek in Alamo.”

“I live in Montclair!”

Gee fucking wilikers.

“We should have lunch sometimes.”

“We should,” I say.

“Would you mind giving me your number?”

“No, I don’t mind,” I say, which is a lie. I have already given my number to whoever I want to have it but I cannot say that to Ralston. “Just get it from Rudy or Maisha,” I say.

“I will call,” he says.

“I’m sure you will,” I say. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to take a look at the rest of the show.”

“Go right ahead,” he says, peering at me like he has made some kind of discovery. What he doesn’t understand is that a prior claim has already been made.

I’
M SCARED
,
WORRIED
and beginning to wonder if maybe I am going a little bizonkers. I’m in my truck, on my way to the grocery store. The light is red and I’m just sitting there thinking what have I gotten myself into? I mean what in the hell am I
really
doing? I mean did I actually send a twenty-one-year-old a first-class airline ticket to come visit me and he said yes and he’s coming here to my home for three whole weeks? I mean, what are we going to do for three whole weeks? I haven’t had a man in my house longer than twenty-four hours in almost three
years.
You mean someone’ll finally get to use that other sink in my bathroom? But does this also mean I’ll have to clear off that entire counter of all my fingernail polish lotions perfume and makeup? Where will I put this stuff? And what about drawers? Or will he keep his things folded up in his suitcase(s) and I wonder how many of those will he be bringing? And will he want to party all the time? Probably. I mean he loves to dance, and I don’t do the town all that much—well, never, really—which means I’m going to have to do some serious investigating to find the best spots for dancing. But what else? What will we do all day long, since I’m home these days? Will I be carting him around everywhere, because he probably can’t drive and if he can, can he drive a stick, and if so I know he won’t be able to adjust to driving on the right side of the street and I wonder does he even have a driver’s license? Should I do his laundry for him while he’s here or just let it pile up? What if he gets on my nerves? What if I get on
his
nerves? What if after a few days I realize I don’t like him anymore? That it was just a crush a lustful heated fascination an infatuation. That Angela was right and this was nothing more than a tropical apparition. That I only want him because he’s taboo. I wonder if maybe I
was
lonely as hell, hard up, just grateful for some attention. No, I wasn’t that fucking hard up and I haven’t exactly been dying of loneliness. I can get a man if I want a man but finding one I really like and yearn for is a whole different brand of Snapple. So no, that’s not it. What if he doesn’t like American food, what will he eat? What if he dies while he’s here? Or what if he gets a toothache or needs an appendectomy or is bringing some incurable tropical disease over here with him? And how about those fruit flies? Does he own a jacket or a coat with a lining in it? I mean the temperature is already starting to drop here and if it turns out that I happen to still kind of like him after he leaves it would be nice if he could like come back for say a winter visit since he will have had a fall visit and then I could take him up to Lake Tahoe and he could see some real snow and we could lie down and make angels and with those long arms, wow, what wings he could make. And Quincy could show him how to snowboard and I could show him how to fly downhill and do bumps. I wonder if he’s ever seen snow? If he’s ever touched anything so cold and soft.

Oh no. There’s one of my neighbors. Shit. The neighbors! What about the neighbors? Who am I going to tell them he is because they will ask they ask about anything that looks new and Winston will be a new addition on the block and a tall handsome one at that and with a Jamaican accent and everybody knows I went to Jamaica this summer and they will think I probably bought him or blackmailed him or kidnapped him and how will I account for his presence? I mean
who
is he?

I hear someone honking behind me. “I’m moving!” I yell and jut forward put on my blinker and turn into Safeway and now I am smiling. I get a parking space right in front, which means there is a God, and now I’m laughing because I realize that the reason I’m having so much fun this summer is that for the first time in a long long time I am not all that worried about what anybody thinks, and so yes, I am acting a little irrationally, a little spontaneously, but hell, if I had known that acting silly and foolish felt this good I’d have been behaving like this a long time ago.

So to hell with the neighbors. I don’t care what they think. Well, I sort of do because I happen to like my neighbors and besides, I forgot I do have this child who has to face their children on a daily basis, so I will have a little chat with Quincy about yet another deep anthropological philosophical spiritual issue to which I’m sure he will respond in his very own Quincyesque manner. God, I love that boy. Now what did I come here for? Oh yeah, groceries.

• • • •

Quincy and I are bonding again. It is a Saturday night and we are sitting on the red leather love seat in our family room and the dog is at our feet. I wish someone were here to take this picture. We are watching the Discovery Channel, a show called
Shipwrecked
, which I didn’t tune in to until Quincy had already been watching it about fifteen minutes, but when I asked him if he wanted me to sit down and bond with him, he said, “Sure, Mom. Even though you don’t even know what the word means!”

We both laugh at that because we like to joke around with and use as much of the nineties slang as we can so we will remain among the hip hipper hippest of families ever to grace the suburbs. Not really. He throws the afghan across our laps even though it is rather warm in here and the French doors are open. We are watching what I assume are Australians on a gigantic boat out in the middle of some ocean doing something. “Is this Australia?”

“I’m not sure,” Quincy says.

“Why don’t you know?”

“Because they haven’t said where they are.”

“I bet they have said it and you just weren’t listening.”

“I have been listening.”

“Well, where do you think they are?”

“In the sea.”

I want to say, No shit—you are so deep, Quincy. But I wouldn’t dare. “If they did say where they are and you just haven’t been paying attention, you should be paying attention because you’re going to be in junior high school in two weeks and your attention span is going to count for a whole lot and right now you are unable to answer a simple little question that I have posed to you in front of whatever this is but you know what?”

“What?”

“I still love you, boy!”

“I love you too, Mom, but if you hadn’t been in the kitchen banging pots and pans so loud in the dishwasher maybe I would’ve been able to hear where they were!” and as he’s saying it he slowly but steadily rises to a standing position.

“What are they diving for anyway?”

“Some kind of old ship or treasure or something,” he says and flops back down in one kerplunk.

“Which is it?”

“Both!”

“How close are they to finding it?”

“Well, they’ve found some interesting stuff down there, but not enough to answer all their questions. And you know what’s really cool? They don’t have the right kind of equipment to do the kind of diving they’re doing but they’re doing it anyway and guess what, Mom? There’re sharks down there.”

“So are you saying that the sharks could like eat them or kill them?”

“Exactly.”

I stare at the crew on the boat. There must be at least twelve of them. They are all men. They are all white. They are all crazy in my estimation because it is apparent as I watch them holding up their maps and plotting their course that there is no way I’d be out in the middle of a fucking ocean diving for some old ship that may or may not have any treasure on it while sharks down there could possibly eat me up. “Black people would not be out there searching for some sunken ship unless they knew for sure that it had at least a gazillion dollars on it and even if it did no way would they be diving down there with the wrong jumpsuits on that sharks could like chew right through. Black people don’t like this kind of danger.”

Quincy scrunches up his shoulders. “But Mom, this is
exciting
to these guys, you have to give them that much—come on.”

I am shocked to hear him say this because he certainly is not as black as I was when I was his age. As a matter of fact, we would be dissing these people right now, calling them fools and yelling at the TV just like we used to when we turned our heads upside down on the floor so we could see under the skirts of those square-dancing ladies, laughing at them for not having anything close to rhythm, for looking ridiculous, and then during horror movies when the monster would come after the blond bombshell and she always fell down we would get mad and yell, “Get up, dummy!” and when she was too slow or broke her stupid high heel and we wondered what she was doing in high heels when she was at a picnic or at a campsite or when she finally fell into a hole or a ditch or whatever or was dangling from a branch or something we would stand up and scream, “Kill that clumsy dummy, Swamp Man! Go ahead, eat her bootie up!”

I sit here without once getting up not even to go to the bathroom which I really need to do but I made a promise to myself that tonight I would watch an entire show with Quincy. I’ve been trying to do this on a regular basis since we’ve come back from Jamaica, at least when I’m able to catch him.

The show goes off and of course the guys had put two and two together and realized that the ship had to have come from Saudi Arabia based on x, y, and z and shoot, after I studied the map and backtracked the route it led straight from the Indian Ocean on up to the Arabian Sea and I could’ve told them that but it has been very nice sitting here watching anything with my son who turns to me on this sofa and says, “Mom, I like it when we do this,” and I peck him on his forehead and say, “I do too, Quin. And we’ve only just begun.”

He is just about to hop up from the sofa.

“Wait a minute, Quincy. We need to talk.”

“Again?” he asks and flops back down.

“Again.”

“What did I do now?”

“Nothing.”

“Is this gonna be a lecture?”

“No.”

“How long will it take, do you think?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because
Ren and Stimpy
’s coming on in a few minutes and then
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
, and Mom, can I stay up until eleven-thirty to watch
The State
?”

“The what?”

“It’s on MTV.”

“Is it as ludicrous as Beavis and Butt-head?”

“Not at all. Ha ha ha, didn’t think I remembered that word, did you?”

“I know you’re smart, Quincy, but I just want you to keep proving it to yourself, because I’m already impressed. You see, I was generous in that delivery room and I told the doctor to make sure you got some of my best brain cells and a few of your dad’s and apparently you wiped out most of his supply but anyway I’m convinced that you’re more intelligent than the two of us put together and ten times brighter than you think you are. You’ll see. You know, I used to play a game when I was little.”

“What kind of game?”

“I constantly tried to amaze myself.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, first of all, being dumb was never a goal of mine. I knew a lot of ignorant people and I wanted to be smart, smart enough to live an interesting life when I grew up, so when I was in junior high school I used to pick a letter for the day like say B and read as much as I could in the B encyclopedia and I would circle words in the newspaper I didn’t know and look them up and write sentences using them and give them to my mother at the end of the week.”

“And?”

“And I’m all off the track. See what you made me do—you made me lose my train of thought.”

“I didn’t, Mom! You always do this and you know it.”

“Do what?”

“Start talking about one topic and then end up talking about a different thing. You should stick to your topic sentence. I learned that way back in fifth grade, Mom. Stick to your topic.”

“Okay. You know when Winston gets here some of the neighbors might be a little curious about who he is.”

“Yeah.”

“And they might not understand.”

“Might not understand what?”

“Well, first of all that he’s a lot younger than I am.”

“Mom, remember: age ain’t nothing . . .”

“I know, but some people don’t feel that way.”

“But you do, don’t you?”

“I try, but our neighbors are pretty regular folks and they might not get it and they might want to ask you about Winston.”

“But it’s none of their business, is it?”

“No, it isn’t, but we don’t exactly want to come out and say that because it would be kind of tacky and just rude really.”

“So what kind of questions do you think they’ll ask?”

“Well, like who is he, for starters.”

“And what should I say, Mom?”

“Well, I don’t want you to lie. Say that he’s our friend and he’s visiting from Jamaica.”

“That’s the truth.”

“Yes, it is. And when and if anybody asks you how long he’s staying you can say just a few weeks but he might actually be coming back to go to graduate school here, you’re not sure.”

“What’s graduate school?”

“College.”

“Is he?”

“I don’t know, Quincy.”

“Mom, are you lying about this stuff?”

“No! And if anybody, anybody at all, happens to ask you where he’s sleeping, what do you think you should say?”

He hunches up his shoulders, because he’s not sure what answer I’m looking for.

“Just tell them he’s sleeping with your mom which is why she’s looking so good, whistling and smiling so much more these days.”