that day I walked Phoebe and Sidonie all the way home instead of just three-quarters of the way. As usual I walked on the outside of our trio, taking the position of a gentleman protecting ladies from roadside traffic. As usual Phoebe’s siblings were waiting for us outside the elementary school, three rowdy little girls of indeterminate age and the shortest of short-term memories. Every school day they asked if they could play with my hair, and I let them. Every school day they squealed: “It’s just like sunshine!” and I wished they’d find a new sensation. Ordinarily I stopped when we reached the corner of Tubman and Jefferson—less because there was a tangible change in the neighborhood and more because that was when we started seeing groups of colored boys leaning against walls with their arms folded, not talking or doing anything else but leaning. I figured they were the Neighborhood Watch, and left them to it. So did the white boys who followed us along Jefferson calling out Sidonie’s name. We got to Tubman Street and the catcallers evaporated. But that day I kept going because I wanted Sidonie to come to dinner. Phoebe had already excused herself on account of having to watch her sisters while her mom was at work. But Sidonie was an only child, and hesitated. “Ma probably needs me to help her tonight,” she said. “But maybe if you came and asked her yourself . . .”
I wavered, needing time to get everything on the menu wrong and then get it right. Sidonie said: “Hey, you’ve got a lot to do before dinnertime, right? Save me a slice of that chiffon cake; it’s going to be in my dreams tonight.”
Phoebe said, “Me too!” and her sisters said, “Me too, me too!” I told them it’d be Sidonie who brought them the cake, and passed the Tubman Street Neighborhood Watch without incident. Farther along Tubman, a mixed group was crammed into a motorcar; girls sat on boys’ laps, waving transistor radios in time to the music that poured out of them. These kids looked a little older than Sidonie, and ignored us completely. The houses were smaller and newer and better cared for than in Arturo’s part of town. Their doors were pastel painted, the front yards were meticulously well-swept, and their windows sparkled in the way that only the truly house-proud seem able to achieve. We passed other groups. Boys and girls, singing, wisecracking. Lone dutiful daughters and sons laden with groceries. One boy with a buzz cut was carrying what looked like a week’s supplies for an old lady who called him “Tortoise” and “Useless.” His friends pulled faces at him when the old lady wasn’t looking, and he grinned good-humoredly. “That’s Sam,” Phoebe said. “He’s my boyfriend. He just doesn’t know it yet.” And she and Sidonie giggled.
Then I saw Kazim. He was part of a bunch of boys gathered around an open window, trampling some poor gardener’s petunias. There was a green parakeet in a cage inside the living room, and the boys were trying to teach it a new phrase. This is what they were trying to teach it to say: Fuck whitey. The parakeet stumbled backward along its perch. Sidonie put her hand on my arm to keep me walking, and I did keep walking, but I looked back. The group’s main teaching method seemed to be intimidation. They crowded the square of grass beneath the window, repeating the phrase over and over, all voices together. I heard the parakeet pleading “Hey diddle diddle, he-ee-ee-y diddle diddle!” but the boys insisted: Fuck whitey, fuck whitey. I saw Kazim and he saw me. He looked away first. He had been laughing until he saw me.
“I guess Kazim’s found better things to do than read books,” I said to Sidonie, or to Phoebe, or maybe just to the air. Phoebe and Sidonie looked at each other, and Phoebe said: “I don’t know what you mean, Miss Novak.”
I jerked my thumb at the boys across the way. “Yes, you do. I saw him.”
Phoebe said: “Saw . . . Kazim?”
A man about a quarter of a block down opened his window and issued a warning that he was on his way to end the lives of anyone responsible for creating “this racket,” and the parakeet boys scattered.
Sidonie said: “That wasn’t Kazim.”
Phoebe said: “I guess we all look the same to you.” She smiled to show she wasn’t saying it in a mean way, and ran in at her front door with her sisters hot on her heels.
My temples began to throb. It was Kazim; I knew it was him. What did Phoebe and Sidonie take me for, and why had they just closed ranks like that? Were they trying to tell me that I was on my own if I said anything about Kazim back at the bookstore?
Sidonie stopped at a peppermint-colored door and said: “Voilà—chez Fairfax.” I didn’t answer her, just looked all around me, picturing the walk back down to Jefferson without the girls. All the lines washed out of everything I tried to fix my eyes on. It was like a floodlight had been switched on just above my head. Sidonie said something I didn’t hear, then: “Miss Novak? It wasn’t him. Really. Kazim’s not a round-the-way boy. He stays home drawing and doing his wizard stuff. Relax. We all make mistakes.”
—
i sat down on a wicker bench in the hallway, next to a table stacked with Ebony and Jet magazines. Intriguing text hovered beside the faces of the colored models on the covers: Are homosexuals becoming respectable? End of Negro race by 1980 predicted by top scientist. An older, far less haughty-looking version of Sidonie approached; she was in a wheelchair, and spun the wheels with her arms. I stood, then sat down again, not wanting to stand over her. Elsewhere in the house a television set blared and women talked over it and each other.
“Welcome, welcome,” Mrs. Fairfax said, shaking my hand. She said I should call her Merveille, or Merva if I couldn’t manage to say Merveille. “In America I am Merva . . .”
Sidonie must have told her I was a teacher: “You are so kind to invite Sidonie to dinner. Some other time . . . let Sidonie bring you; you will dine with us, I will give you such a dinner. Does Sidonie behave herself? Is her schoolwork good? Does she read too much?”
Merveille made me drink something so sweet it made my teeth ache; she said it was called sorrel. She was a hairdresser; she worked from home and Sidonie helped her in the evenings. She must have seen that I was wondering how she managed to do people’s hair—maybe everyone who met her for the first time wondered about that—she tapped my wrist and said: “I manage. People have to sit a lot lower than usual while I work, but they don’t mind because they leave looking good. Not just good . . . very good.” Her husband was a Pullman porter working the train route to Quebec and back. She showed me her appointment book. She had clients all the way up to midnight.
Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that’s supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone’s crossed that line? I said Sidonie was top of my class and that everybody liked her.
It was getting dark when I left, and I thought about calling Arturo from a phone booth and getting him to come pick me up. But it would take too long. So I just walked fast, with my head down, and didn’t raise it again until I got back to Jefferson Street.