Homegoing(102)

“We ain’t been here but ten minutes, D. Chill,” Marcus said, but he was starting to feel restless too.

“Naw, nigga. I ain’t about to burn up in this damn heat. Let me catch you later.” He got up and shot a small wave to the people in the pool.

Diante was always asking to go to school events with Marcus and then leaving almost as soon as they arrived. He was looking for a girl he’d met at an art museum once. He couldn’t remember her name, but he told Marcus that he could tell she was a schoolgirl, just from the way she talked. Marcus didn’t feel the need to remind him that there were about a million universities in the area. Who could say the girl would end up at one of his parties?

Marcus was getting his Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford. It was something he would never have been able to imagine doing back when he was splitting a mattress with his father, and yet, there he was. Sonny had been so proud when he told him he’d been accepted to Stanford that he cried. It was the only time Marcus had ever seen him do it.

Marcus left the party soon after Diante, making up some excuse about work. He walked the six miles home, and when he got there he was sweating through his shirt. He got into the blue-tiled shower and let the water beat over his head, never lifting his face up toward it, still scared of drowning.

—

“Your mama says hi,” Sonny said.

It was their weekly phone call. Marcus made it every Sunday afternoon, when he knew his aunt Josephine and all the cousins would be in Ma Willie’s house cooking and eating after church. He called because he missed Harlem, he missed Sunday dinners, he missed Ma Willie singing gospel at the top of her voice, as if Jesus would be there in ten minutes if she would only just summon him to come fix a plate.



“Don’t lie,” Marcus said. The last time he’d seen Amani was his high school graduation. His mother had dressed up in some outfit Ma Willie had given her, no doubt. It was a long-sleeved dress, but when she lifted her arm to wave at him while he crossed the stage to get his diploma, Marcus was almost certain he could see the tracks.

“Humph” was all Sonny replied.

“Y’all doing good over there?” Marcus asked. “The kids an’ ’em all okay?”

“Yeah, we good. We good.”

They breathed into the phone for a bit. Neither wanting to speak, but neither wanting to hang up the phone, either.

“You still straight?” Marcus asked. He didn’t ask often, but he asked.

“Yeah, I’m good. Don’t you worry ’bout me. Keep yo head in dem books. Don’t be thinkin’ ’bout me.”

Marcus nodded. It took him a while to realize that his father wouldn’t be able to hear that, and so he said, “Okay,” and they finally hung up the phone.

Afterward, Diante came by to get him. He was dragging Marcus to a museum in San Francisco, the same one where Diante had met the girl.

“I don’t know why you sweating this girl, D,” Marcus said. He didn’t really enjoy art museums. He never knew what to make of the pieces that he saw. He would listen to Diante talk about lines and color and shading. He would nod, but really, it all meant nothing to him.

“If you saw her, you’d understand,” Diante said. They were walking around the museum, and neither of them was really taking in any of the art.

“I understand she must look good.”

“Yeah, she look good, but it ain’t even about that, man.”

Marcus had already heard it before. Diante had met the woman at the Kara Walker exhibit. The two of them had paced the floor-to-ceiling black paper silhouettes four times before their shoulders brushed on the fifth pass. They’d talked about one piece in particular for nearly an hour, never remembering to get each other’s name.



“I’m telling you, Marcus. You gon’ be at the wedding soon. Alls I gotta do is find her.”

Marcus snorted. How many times had Diante pointed out “his wife” at a party only to date her for a week?

He left Diante to himself and wandered the museum alone. More than the art, he liked the museum’s architecture. The intricate stairways and white walls that held works of vibrant colors. He liked the walking and the thinking that the atmosphere allowed him to do.

He had been to a museum once on a class field trip back in elementary school. They’d taken the bus, then walked the remaining blocks on the buddy system, each child holding the next child’s hand. Marcus could remember feeling awed by the rest of Manhattan, the part that wasn’t his, the business suits and feathered hair. In the museum, the ticket taker had smiled at them from way up in the glass booth. Marcus had been craning his neck in order to see her, and she’d rewarded his efforts with a little wave.

Once they’d gone inside, their teacher, Mrs. MacDonald, had led them through room after room, exhibit after exhibit. Marcus was at the end of the line, and LaTavia, the girl whose hand he held, had dropped his in order to sneeze, and so Marcus had taken the opportunity to tie his shoe. When he lifted his head again, his class had moved on. Thinking back, he should have been able to find them quickly, a line of little black ducklings in the big white museum, but there were so many people, and all so tall, that he couldn’t see his way around them, and he quickly grew too frightened to move.

He was standing there, paralyzed and quietly crying, when an elderly white couple found him.