When I open The Black Women’s Health Book, which he bought for me and was reading, a scattering of lottery tickets flutters out.
The Yale art historian Sylvia Boone is buried in Grove Street Cemetery. Her great work is called Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art. She was the first black woman faculty tenured at Yale, a history that feels close, as I am only the third. Her gravestone is a West African wonder in rosy marble etched with seashells and a Sowei mask she’d written about. Ficre and I would sometimes stroll there, sit, and talk. She was a kind of guardian angel of the African diaspora and its mighty ideas; her articulation of black beauty felt like a benediction. In her earlier book about traveling to West Africa—where Boone worked with Malcolm X, and Kwame Nkrumah, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and Maya Angelou—she wrote that travellers should always commit the “charming, hopeful, irrational” act of buying a lottery ticket in new countries. She called it “buy[ing] a chance.” It will make you feel lucky, as if anything could happen, even when “you know you will not be there for the drawing.”
Three
He had a scar on his hip from a dog bite in his childhood. Our first night together I kissed it and he breathed the most profound sigh and asked how did I know exactly where he wanted to be touched, that no one had ever touched him there. Our romance was like that, healing every old wound with magic disappearing powers until they were all tended. We lived out of time, nursed all injuries, shared all the stories and then were fortified and ready to go on with our life together.
At dinner, I ask the boys if they remembered that scar, and they do, and the scar on his hand from when he offered the dog a cookie. No wonder he was wary around dogs! We tell a funny story about how Daddy poked the stick in the donkey’s ass and the donkey kicked his two hind legs in Daddy’s stomach. African stories, stories with animals in them, stories in the backyard, stories with lessons, ghost stories, war stories.
We don’t talk about the old scar on his head, which the treadmill scraped clean off when he died. It is one of our shared nightmare images we wish we could un-see. The old scar was a three-inch, purple-ish ribbon across his scalp. “He fell off his bike,” Solo remembers. “He told us, he fell off his bike and all of the streets of Asmara ran red with his blood.” Simon has already dreamed his father’s head clean and healed without the scar, and that, he says, is how you know Daddy is dead in the dream.
We three loved his head, and caressed it. We were the keepers and protectors of his dear brown head. We loved him with our hands on his head.
Four
I loved my friend
He went away from me
There’s nothing more to say
The poem ends,
Soft as it began-
I loved my friend.
—LANGSTON HUGHES
I look across at his side of the bed as I wake with my mind racing with quandaries and I think, I miss my friend, plain and simple.
The boys and I go to Robert and Michele’s for dinner. They are among the many dear people who have been feeding us. They’ve previously dropped off lentil soup, meat loaf, and Robert’s gravlax, but now we feel we can make and keep a date, and spend an evening with people who will hold us tenderly.
Michele was another one of Ficre’s Italian American sisters. They would cook for each other and speak Italian in the kitchen, discuss the nuances of spinach with currants and pine nuts and the relative merits of pasta shapes: orecchiette versus creste di gallo, rigatoni vs. penne. Tonight, she makes spaghetti with a hundred onions, the most comforting and delicious dish I have ever eaten, which we slurp as though we’ve never been fed before, and talk about Ficre.
“I LOVE him,” Robert says. “Not, I loved him. He IS my friend. I can still talk to him.” Yes, I think, that is true exactly.
But the friendship part of marriage, that is the part that is enacted, that is the part for which you need the person present, and that is what I miss. Robert and Michele are long-marrieds and understand this absolutely. Yes, I still talk to him. Yes, if I still myself enough I can imagine what he would say to guide me. But that is not the same as friendship itself, and friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell.