Harlem Shuffle(6)

She had been listening the whole time, sipping. Mrs. Williams took off her shoes and lay across the curved left arm. She closed her eyes and sighed.

They did a deal for a smaller than usual deposit, with a generous installment plan. Ludicrous, the whole thing. Carney locked the door behind them after they finished the paperwork to prevent another lapse in judgment. Argent’s Metropolitan line was a sound investment, with its chemically treated bouclé cushions and Airform core, voted most comfortable by four out of five respondents in a blind test. It would last a long time, through one kid and another. He was glad he hadn’t told Rusty or Elizabeth about eliminating time payments.

    Rusty clocked out and it was just him. Down for the day after all the cash he dropped. He didn’t know where the rent was going to come from, but it was still early in the month. You never know. The TVs were smart and they were a nice couple and it was good to do for them what no one did for him when he was young: give a hand. “I may be broke, but I ain’t crooked,” he said to himself, as he often did at times like this. When he felt this way. Weary and a little desperate, but also high-hearted. He turned off the lights.





TWO


“Oh, Ruby—yes. She was sweet,” Elizabeth said. She passed the water pitcher. “We played volleyball together.”

In keeping with their history, his wife remembered the dead lady’s daughter, but had no high-school recollection of the man she was going to marry. Carney and his wife had biology class together, and civics, and one downpour Thursday he walked her four blocks under his umbrella, out of his way even. “Are you sure?” Elizabeth said. “I thought that was Richie Evans.” Her teenage memory rendered him a blank space, like the one left after she cut out a paper doll for May. Carney had yet to devise a comeback to her teasing about his inconspicuous profile back then: “It’s not my fault you were you.” He’d think of it one day.

Dinner was Caw Caw chicken. The recipe came from McCall’s, but May pronounced it caw, and it stuck. It was bland—the main seasoning appeared to be breadcrumbs—but they were fond of it. “What if the baby doesn’t like chicken,” Elizabeth asked one night. “Everybody likes chicken,” he responded. They had a good thing going, the three of them, wonky plumbing aside. The new arrival might alter the dynamic in the house. For now, they still had their unspoiled delight in Elizabeth’s main dish, served tonight with rice and stewed green beans, pale ribbons of bacon adrift in the pot.

May squeezed a green bean to mush. Half went in her mouth, the rest on her polka-dot bib. Under her high chair, the linoleum was a mottle of stains. May took after her mother, and her grandmother, had those big brown Jones women’s eyes that took in everything and gave no more than they decided to permit. She had also inherited their will, mulish and impenetrable. Take a look at those beans.

    “Alma go home early?” Carney asked. With Elizabeth on bed rest, her mother came by most days to lend a hand. She was great help with May, if not the kitchen. Even if dinner hadn’t been one of his wife’s trademark dishes, tipping him off, the food tasted good, which meant Alma hadn’t had a hand in it. Elizabeth’s mother cooked the way she did most things, with a healthy sprinkling of spite. In the kitchen it manifested on the tongue.

“I told her we didn’t need her today,” Elizabeth said. A euphemism for Alma meddling too much, necessitating a cooling-off period after Elizabeth lost her temper.

“You didn’t do too much?”

“Just to the store. I had to get out.”

He wasn’t going to make a fuss about it. After she fainted a month ago, Dr. Blair told her to take a break from work, stay off her feet. Let her body devote itself to the job at hand. Stillness went against her character; the more she had on her plate, the happier she was. She had resigned herself to a few months of humdrumery, but it drove her batty. Alma’s constant harping made it worse.

He changed the subject. The store was quiet all day except at the end, he said. “They live in Lenox Terrace. He said he thought they still had some three-bedrooms available.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know, more than what we pay now. I thought I’d take a look.”

He hadn’t brought up moving in more than two weeks. No harm in taking the temperature. One source of Alma’s carping was the size of their apartment, and for once Carney agreed with her. For Elizabeth’s mother, their small apartment was another way her daughter had settled for less than she deserved.

    Alma used the word settled the way the less genteel used motherfucker, as a chisel to pry open a particular feeling. Elizabeth had settled for her position at the travel agency, after her parents’ careful maneuverings to elevate her, turn her into an upstanding Negro doctor, upstanding Negro lawyer. Booking hotels, airplane flights—it was not what they intended for her.

She’d settled for Carney, that was clear. That family of his. From time to time, Carney still overheard his father-in-law refer to him as “that rug peddler.” Elizabeth had brought her parents to the store to show it off, on a day Moroccan Luxury happened to deliver a shipment. The rugs were marvelous specimens, couldn’t keep them in stock, but the delivery men that day were disheveled and hungover—they usually were—and on seeing them slide the rugs down the basement chute, Mr. Jones muttered, “What is he, some sort of rug peddler?” Knowing full well the range of home goods Carney sold, all of which were of fine quality. Go into a white store downtown, it was the same stuff, Moroccan Luxury sold all over. Not to mention—what was wrong with selling rugs? It was more honorable than grifting the city out of taxes, Mr. Jones’s specialty, no matter how he dressed it up.