Transcendent Kingdom(17)

My parents started hiding whatever food could be hidden. Open a drawer and look in the very back and you might find an Ovaltine cracker. Nestled between stacks of clothing in their closet were the bananas.

“Here’s what we do,” Nana said when the Cheerios went missing one day when both of our parents were at work and the two of us were left to our own devices, to our hunger. “We’ll split up. You check the low places and I’ll check the high places.”

We opened every drawer, looked atop every shelf, and collected our booty in the middle of the living room. There were all the things we’d expected to be hidden, and many more things we didn’t even know we had. At age four, I was already a fiend for Malta. I liked to suck down the bitter foam from the top of the bottle and drink in large gulps. I would have had one every day, for every meal, if I could have, but I’d been told it was a party drink only, unavailable on regular days. But now there it was, along with all the other forbidden fruits.

    Nana and I tore into the food and drinks, giggling. We had only about an hour before the Chin Chin Man returned home, and we knew that all the food would need to go back exactly where we’d found it. Nana ate chocolate and Cheerios, I sipped a Malta slowly, savoring the sweet barley taste, and at dinner that night, seated across the table from each other while our parents passed around bowls of light soup, we would catch each other’s eyes and grin, sharing our tasty secret.



* * *



—

“Who did this?” my mother said, pulling an empty granola bar wrapper from the trash. The jig was up. Nana and I had been careful, but clearly not careful enough. Even the trash wasn’t safe from our mother’s exacting eye.

“Who did this? Where did you find it?”

I burst into tears, giving us away. I was ready to confess to all of our crimes, but the Chin Chin Man chimed in. “Leave the kids alone. Do you want them to starve? Is that what you want?”

My mother pulled something out of her purse. A bill? A receipt? “We will all starve if we don’t start making more money. We can’t afford to live like this any longer.”

“You were the one who wanted to come here, remember?”

And so it went. Gently, gently, Nana took my hand and led me out of the room. We went to his bedroom and he closed the door. He pulled a coloring book from his bookshelf and grabbed me the crayons. Before long I wasn’t listening anymore.

    “Good job, Gifty,” he said as I showed him my work. “Good job,” and outside the sound of chaos swirled on.





14





Toward the middle of my first year of graduate school, Raymond and I started seeing each other more seriously. I couldn’t get enough of him. He smelled like vetiver and musk and the jojoba oil he put in his hair. Hours after I’d left him, I would find traces of those scents on my fingers, my neck, my breasts, all those places where we had brushed up against each other, touched. After our first night in bed together, I’d learned that Raymond’s father was a preacher at an African Methodist Episcopal church in Philadelphia, and I’d laughed. “So that’s why I like you,” I said. “You’re the son of a preacher man.”

“You like me, huh?” he said with that deep voice, that sly grin, as he moved toward me so that we could begin again.

It was my first real relationship, and I was so smitten that I felt like I was a living lily of the valley, a rose of Sharon. Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. My friend Bethany and I used to read passages from Song of Solomon to each other, crouched beneath the pale blue pews in the empty sanctuary of the First Assemblies of God. It felt illicit to read about all of that flesh—breasts like fawns, necks like ivory towers—in the pages of this holy book. It was an incongruous thrill, to feel that flush of desire well up between my legs as Bethany and I giggled through those verses. Where is all of this pleasure coming from? I’d think, my voice getting huskier and huskier with each chapter. Raymond was the closest I’d come to recapturing that feeling, the pleasure as well as the sense of forbiddenness. The fact that he wanted to be with me at all made me feel like I was getting away with some con.

    He lived on campus, in an Escondido Village low-rise, and pretty soon I was spending most of my time there. He liked to cook these sumptuous meals, five-hour braises with homemade bread and salads of shaved radishes and fennel. He’d invite all of his colleagues from Modern Thought and Literature, and they would have intense, detailed conversations about things I had never heard of. I’d nod and smile at the mentions of the use of allegory in Ben Okri’s Stars of the New Curfew or generational trauma among diasporic communities.

Afterward, I would wash the dishes the way my mother taught me, turning off the water as I soaped down the pots and pans, trying to get rid of the elaborate mess Raymond’s cooking always left behind.

“You’re so quiet,” he said, coming up behind me to wrap his arms around my waist, to kiss my neck.

“I haven’t read any of the books y’all were talking about.”

He turned me around to face him, grinned. I almost never let a “y’all” slip from my lips, and when I did Raymond seemed to savor it like a drop of honey on his tongue. That word used sparingly, thoughtlessly, was the only remaining evidence of my Alabama years. I’d spent a decade carefully burying everything else.