I didn’t pursue it. He had planted a seed of possibility. It could happen. I knew that Jan never played with Stefan Schultz, because Jan’s father had a hole in the palm of his right hand from a piece of German shrapnel. Jan said that when he was little he would watch his father push a pencil all the way through his hand, but now it was closed over and all you could see was the scar. In our neighbourhood Mario Galliano could conceivably pull out a gun and shoot Julio Estevez. The Ayoubs crossed the street rather than talk to the Heintzmans. The Maloneys thought the Lancasters were stuck up and the Lancasters called the Maloneys a seething den of filthy criminal brats. The more I thought about it, the more dangerous my neighbourhood seemed, and now, with the appearance of this star athlete, the perils of big-city American life were as close as the width of our street, the distance from my observation post to the Vanderhoeks’ machete-carved walkway entrance.
Leda, who was one of the Riderette cheerleaders, embodied one of my first fantasies that year and for the next couple until I discovered my father’s stash of Playboy magazines. In my fantasy she comes out of her house, but instead of getting into Lamar Cleveland’s Mustang she crosses the street and climbs up the embankment beside our driveway and down the ladder into my snow cave. There I have a lantern and a bed big enough for two and a down-filled sleeping bag that we snuggle under. She has white frosted eye-liner and lipstick, pink pantyhose, a white mini-dress, white vinyl boots and the fur coat, all of which she keeps on because of the cold. I tell her that I notice she walks with a bit of a limp and she says that is because she has one leg shorter than the other.
“Would you like me to show you?”
I say yes, of course I would, trying to sound like a concerned doctor.
“Turn on your flashlight,” she says and I do, and under the Woods Five-Star, good to forty below, she pulls off her boots to reveal the difference. Sure enough, one leg reaches about a quarter of an inch farther than the other down the bed and to me this is fascinating. Then she asks me if I would like to remove her pantyhose and I say yes then no then yes, and usually that’s as far as it gets, that particular dream.
She came down the sidewalk and I heard, “Ma, where did you put my…” the rest obscured by the wind. So occupied was she with the misplaced item that when she got to the end of the walk she realized she couldn’t get past her mother. They did a little exasperated dance. Go back, her mother gestured. “No,” said Leda. “Then how?” They scrutinized the impasse. If Leda refused to retreat and her mother was trapped between her and the car, the only way out was for Lamar to move the vehicle so that Mrs. Vanderhoek could step down into the street. She was by this time beginning to act cold, her hock arms mottled red and white. She turned and indicated that Lamar should move his car forward or back so that some progress might be made. Either he didn’t understand or didn’t think it was a good idea. He reached across the bucket seat and opened the passenger-side door, but it would open only slightly before hitting the snow bank. This is insane, the good woman seemed to be saying, in her expression, her gestures, her language of canals and tulips and spotless front stoeps.
Girl, turn around this instant and let me pass, I imagine her saying.
“No, Mama, I’m late. Lamar has been waiting too long now. You don’t know how he gets.”
“Well, my smart, my beautiful, my perceptive, tell me, what am I supposed to do?”
Lamar sat upright and hit the steering wheel with the heels of both open palms. He refrained, barely, from sounding the musical horn again. Somewhere warm breezes were blowing. Somewhere a sprinkler was spritzing and kids were taking turns running through the spray. On a wide whitewashed porch a woman flapped the hem of her skirt to pull cool air up over her burning thighs. She rolled a glass of iced tea across her forehead.
The women began pushing each other. “You move. No, you!” The light was thinning under wisps of cloud.
I was getting cold and had to go to the bathroom and debated leaving my post, but I didn’t want to miss anything. I wondered what Jan was doing. Mr. Vanderhoek, tall, thin, with a severe crew cut, appeared briefly like a spectre in the doorway to see what the commotion was about.
“Do you want to drive him away? Is that what you want?”
“He won’t drive away because of me, that’s for sure.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, just think about it.”
“I am. I have no idea.”
“Of course you have no idea. You always have no idea. What is it, do you think, that keeps him coming back?”
“Your mind is sick, Mama. Let me get by or I swear I will scream.”
“Go ahead. I’d like to hear it. You don’t know what a scream is. You’ve never heard a real scream in your life.”
“Please, please, please, mother, you are ruining my life.”
“Maybe I am saving your life, did you ever think about that?”
“I can wait as long as you can.”
“Good, so can I…. I’m not trying to ruin your life.”
“Then how do you explain this?”
“It’s not wide enough.”
“No, I meant…”
“It’s a passing fancy.”
“A what?”
“He’ll grow tired of you. They always do. As soon as they get what they want they move on.”
“They?”
“Yes. Men.”
“Black men, you mean.”
Lamar leaned across, rolled the window back up, scraped an oval of frost away from the inside of the windshield, hit the accelerator, making the back wheels spin uselessly, eased off, braked, and pulled away. I saw him drive off, but Leda and her mother didn’t.
“I have never hated anyone or anything as much as I hate you right now.”
“You don’t mean that. You don’t know what hatred is.”
“You want me to meet somebody from around here, a nice boy from a good family. A doctor or a diplomat. Right, Mama? An intelligent, good provider with a pipe and slippers and all the right social connections. Well I don’t want intelligent, and I don’t want slippers. I want Lamar. He’s fun. He’s got money. He’s got this great car. We go wherever we want and we never stand in line. It makes you crazy to see me with him, doesn’t it?”
“No, Leda, it makes me a little bit sad and a lot nervous. To tell the honest truth.”
“Screw your honest truth, Mama.”
Leda turned, stomped and skittered back up the walk to the front steps, turned right, followed the path a short distance to the driveway, and came, mincing and sliding and falling twice, to the end of it. She stepped into the street to get beyond the snow bank.
She stood, her arms crossed, looking up and down the street. She was separated from her mother by the length of the snow wall. They could see each other’s heads, that was all. Mrs. Vanderhoek was nodding hers in an erratic, shivering way, the look on her face ambiguous, a grin or a grimace. Leda stood, mouth agape, eyes wide, hands held palm-up in a sideline gesture of the sincerely, rapturously, uncomprehendingly astonished.
Me, I couldn’t wait any longer. The show seemed to be over, so I crawled out of my foxhole and went inside our house to pee and get warm.
