Brooke (18 page)

I didn't care about not having her as a close friend. Most of the time, I was happy being with myself, reading a magazine, or watching soaps whenever I could get the television set to work. I tried not to think about Mama sleeping late, maybe even with some new man in her room. I had gotten so I could look through people and pretend they weren't even there.

“You just better damn well go to school tomorrow, Raven. I don't need no government people coming around here and snooping,” she muttered, and wiped strands of hair away from her cheek. “You listening to me?”

“Yes,” I said. She stared hard and drank some more of her beer. It was only nine-fifteen in the morning. I hated the taste of beer anyway, but just the thought of
drinking it this early made my stomach churn. Mama suddenly realized what day it was and that I should be in school. Her eyes popped.

“Why are you home today?” she cried.

“I had a stomachache,” I said. “I'm getting my period. That's what the nurse told me in school when I had cramps and left class.”

She looked at me with a cold glint in her dark eyes and nodded.

“Welcome to hell,” she said. “You'll soon understand why parents give thanks they had a boy. Men have it so much easier. You better watch yourself now,” she warned, pointing the neck of the beer bottle at me.

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean,” she mimicked. “I mean if you got your period coming, you could get pregnant, Raven, and I won't be taking care of no baby, not me.”

“I'm not getting pregnant, Mama,” I said sharply.

She laughed. “That's what I said and look at what happened.”

“Well, why did you have me, then?” I fired back at her. I was tired of hearing what a burden I was. I wasn't. I was the one who kept the apartment livable, cleaning up after her drunken rages, washing dishes, washing clothes, mopping the bathroom floor. I was the one who bought us food and who cooked for us half the time. Sometimes she brought food from the restaurant, when she remembered, but it was usually cold and greasy by the time she brought it home.

“Why'd I have you? Why'd I have you?” she muttered, and looked dazed, as if the question was too hard to answer. Her face brightened with rage.
“I'll tell you why. Because your macho Cuban father was going to make us a home. He was positive you were going to be a boy. How could he have anything but boys? Not Mr. Macho. Then, when you were born . . .”

“What?” I asked quickly. Getting her to tell me anything about my father or what things were like for her in those days was as hard as getting top government secrets.

“He ran. As soon as he set eyes on you, he grimaced and said, 'It's a girl? Can't be mine.' And he ran. Ain't heard from him since,” she muttered. She looked thoughtful for a moment and then turned back to me. “Let that be a lesson to you about men.”

What lesson? I wondered. How did she think it made me feel to learn that my father couldn't stand the sight of me, that my very birth sent him away? How did she think it made me feel to hear almost every day how she never asked to have me? Sometimes she called me her punishment. I was God's way of getting back at her, but what did she consider her sin? Not drinking or doing drugs or slumming about, oh no. Her sin was trusting a man. Was she right? Was that the way all men behaved? Most of my mother's friends agreed with her about men, and many of my friends, who came from homes not much better than mine, had similar ideas taught to them by their mothers.

I felt more alone than ever. Getting older, developing as a woman, looking older than I was, none of it made me feel more independent and stronger as much as it reminded me I really had no one but myself. I had many questions. I had lots of things troubling me, things a girl would want to ask her
mother, but I was afraid to ask mine, and most of the time, I didn't think she could think clearly enough to answer them anyway.

“You got what you need?” she asked, dropping the empty beer bottle into the garbage.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is something to wear for protection. Didn't that school nurse tell you what you need?”

“Yes, Mama, I have what I need,” I said.

I didn't.

What I needed was a real mother and a real father, for starters, but to me that was something I'd see only on television.

“I don't want to hear about you not going to school, Raven. If I do, I'm going to call your uncle Reuben,” she warned. She often used her brother as a threat. She knew I never liked him, never liked being in his company. I didn't think his own children liked him and I knew my aunt Carla was afraid of him. I could see it in her eyes.

Mama returned to her bedroom and went back to sleep. I sat by the window and looked down at the street. Our apartment was on the third floor. There were no elevators, just a windy stairway that sounded like it was about to collapse, especially when younger children ran down the steps or when Mr. Winecoup, the man who lived above us, walked up. He easily weighed three hundred pounds. The ceiling shook when he paced about in his apartment.

I looked beyond the street, out toward the mountains in the distance, and wondered what was beyond them. I dreamed of running off to find a place where the sun always shone, where houses were clean and
smelled fresh, where parents laughed and loved their children, where there were fathers who cared and mothers who cared.

“You might as well live in Disneyland,” a voice told me. “Stop dreaming.”

I rose and began my day of solitude, finding something to eat, watching some television, waiting for Mama to wake up so we could talk about dinner before she went off to her job. When she was rested and sober enough, she would sit before her vanity mirror and work on her hair and face enough to give others the illusion she was healthy and still attractive. While she did her makeup, she ranted and raved about her life and what she could have been if she hadn't fallen for the first good-looking man and believed his lies.

I tried to ask her questions about her own youth, but she hated answering questions about her family. Her parents had practically disowned her, and she had left home when she was eighteen, but she didn't realize any of her own dreams. The biggest and most exciting thing in her life was her small flirtation with becoming a model. Some department store manager had hired her to model in the women's department, but then “He wanted sexual favors, so I left,” she told me. Once again she went into one of her tirades about men.

“If you hate men so much,” I asked her, “why do you go out with one almost every other night?”

“Don't have a smart mouth, Raven,” she fired back. She thought a moment and then she shrugged. “I'm entitled to some fun, aren't I? Well? I work hard. Let them take me out and spend some money on me.”

“Don't you ever want to meet anyone nice, Mama?” I asked. “Don't you ever want to get married again?”

She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes looked sad for a moment, and then she put on that angry look and spun on me.

“NO! I don't want to have no man lording over me again. And besides,” she said, practically screaming, “I didn't get married. I never had a wedding, not even in a court.”

“But I thought . . . my father . . .”

“He was your father, but he wasn't my husband. We just lived together,” she said. She looked away.

“But I have his name . . . Flores,” I stuttered.

“It was just to save my reputation,” she admitted. She turned to me and smiled coldly. “You can call yourself whatever you want.”

I stared, my heart quivering. I didn't even have a name?

When I looked in the mirror, who did I see? No one, I thought.

I might as well be invisible, I concluded, and returned to my seat by the window, watching the gray clouds twirl toward the mountains, toward the promise of something better.

That promise.

It was all I had.

I
awoke to the sound of knocking, but I wasn't sure if it was someone at our door. People pounded on the walls in this apartment building at all times of the day and night. The knocking grew sharper, more frenzied, and then I heard my uncle Reuben's voice.

“Raven, damn it, wake up. Raven!”

He hit the door so hard, I thought his fist had gone through it. I reached for my robe and got up quickly.

“Mama!” I called.

I ground the sleep from my eyes and listened. I thought I remembered hearing her come home, but the nights were so mixed up and confused in my memory, I wasn't sure. “Mama?”

Uncle Reuben pounded on the door again, shaking the whole frame. I hurried to Mama's bedroom and gazed in. She wasn't there.

“Raven! Wake up!”

“Coming,” I cried, and hurried to the door. When I unlocked it, he shoved it open so fast, he almost knocked me over.

“What's wrong?” I demanded.

A small naked bulb in the hallway turned the dirty, shadowy walls into a brown the color of a wet paper bag. There was just enough light behind Uncle Reuben to silhouette his stocky six-foot-three body. He hovered in the doorway like some bird of prey, and the silence that followed his urgency frightened me even more. He seemed to be gasping for breath, as if he had run up the stairs.

“What do you want?” I cried.

“Get some things together,” he ordered. “You got to come with me.”

“What? Why?” I stepped back and embraced myself. I would have hated going anywhere with him in broad daylight, much less late at night.

“Put on some light,” he commanded.

I found the switch and lit up the kitchen. The illumination revealed his swollen, sweaty face, the crests of his cheeks as red as a rash. His dark eyes
looked about frantically. He wore only a soiled T-shirt and a pair of oily-looking jeans. Even though he had an administrative job now with the highway department, he still had the bulky muscular frame he had built working on the road crew. His dark brown hair was cut military short, which made his ears look like the wings on Mercury's cap. I used to wonder how Mama and Uncle Reuben could be siblings. His facial features were large and pronounced, the only real resemblance being in their eyes.

“What is it?” I asked. “Why are you here?”

“Not because I want to be, believe me,” he replied, and went to the sink to pour himself a glass of water. “Your mother's in jail,” he added.

“What?”

I had to wait for him to take long gulps of water. He put the glass in the sink as if he expected the maid would clean up after him and then turned to me. For a moment he just drank me in. His gaze made me feel like a cold wind had slipped under my robe. I actually shivered.

“Why is Mama in jail?”

“She got picked up with some drug dealer. She's in big time, real trouble this time,” he said. “You got to come live with us in the meantime, maybe forever,” he added, and spit into the sink.

“Live with you?” My heart stopped.

“Believe me, I'm not happy about it. She called me to come fetch you,” he continued with obvious reluctance. It was as if his mouth fought opening and closing to produce the words. He gazed around our small apartment. “What a pigsty! How does anyone live here?”

Before I could respond, he spun on me.

“Get your things together. I don't want to stay here a moment longer than I have to.”

“How long is she going to be in jail?” I asked, the tears beginning to burn under my eyelids.

“I don't know. Years, maybe,” he said without emotion. “She was still on probation from that last thing. It's late. I have to get up in a few hours and go to work. Get a move on,” he ordered.

“Why can't I just stay here?” I moaned.

“For the simple reason that the court won't permit it. I thought you were a smart kid. If you don't come with me, they'll put you in a foster home,” he added.

For a long moment, I considered the option. I'd be better off with complete strangers than with him.

“And for another reason, I promised your mother.” He studied my face a moment and smiled coldly. “I know what you're thinking. I was surprised she gave a damn too,” he said.

My breath caught and I couldn't swallow. I had to turn away so he wouldn't see the tears escaping and streaming down my cheeks. I hurried into the bedroom and opened the dresser drawers to take out my clothes. The only suitcase I had was small and had to be tied together with belts to close. I found it in the back of my closet and started to pack.