Transcendent Kingdom(21)
My mother squeezed into the seat beside Nana and pulled me up onto her lap. She took his chin in her hand and turned him to face her. “Nana, what’s bothering you?” she said in Twi.
Nana had tears in the corners of his eyes that were threatening to spill, and he was making a face that I’ve only ever seen in young boys, a face that is the fa?ade of a man, hiding a boy who has had to grow up far too fast. I have seen that faux tough look on boys as they pushed shopping carts, walked siblings to school, bought cigarettes for their parents who waited in their cars. It breaks my heart now, to see that face, to recognize the lie of masculinity sitting atop the shoulders of a young child.
Nana blinked his tears back. He sat up a little straighter, gently lifted our mother’s hand from his face, and returned it to her lap. “I don’t want to play soccer anymore,” he said.
Just then one of the referees came onto the bus. He saw the three of us squeezed into those small seats and gave us a sheepish grin, lifting that cowboy hat off his head and placing it onto his heart, as though my family was the national anthem, the yellow school bus a ballpark. “Ma’am, we’re ’bout ready to get this game started and there are a bunch of boys out there saying their star player’s still on this bus.”
My mother didn’t even turn to look at the referee. She kept her eyes trained on Nana. We all remained perfectly quiet and still, and finally the man took the hint, put his cowboy hat back on, and got off the bus.
“You love soccer,” my mother said once we heard the sound of the referee’s cleats crunching the gravel of the lot.
“No, I don’t.”
“Nana,” she said sharply, and then she stopped and exhaled for so long I wondered where she had been keeping all of that air. She could have told Nana that she’d lost a day’s paycheck to chaperone this trip, that she was already on thin ice with the Reynoldses for missing work two weeks before when I wouldn’t stop vomiting and had to be taken to the emergency room. She could have told him how that emergency room bill was higher than she’d expected, even though we had insurance, that the night she’d opened that envelope she sat there at our dining room table crying into her scrubs so that we wouldn’t be able to hear her. She could have told him that she had already had to take on some extra work cleaning houses to afford the fees for the advanced soccer league, and that those fees were nonrefundable and she couldn’t get her time back either. All that time she’d spent working to afford a trip on a bus with a loud daughter and son who’d somehow realized in the two-hour-long bus ride that his father wasn’t coming back.
“We’ll find another way home,” she said. “We don’t have to stay here for one more second, Nana, okay? You don’t have to play if you don’t want to.”
We walked to the Greyhound station, our mother holding our hands the entire time. We took that bus home, and I don’t think Nana made a single noise. I don’t think I did either. I could feel that something had changed among the three of us and I was trying to learn what my role in this new configuration of my family might be. That day was the end of my naughtiness, the beginning of my good years. If our mother was angry or upset at us, me for being a terror, Nana for changing his mind, she didn’t let on. She wrapped us up in her arms during that long ride home, her face inscrutable. When we got home, she put all of Nana’s soccer gear into a box, sealed the box, and dumped it into the nether regions of our garage, never to be seen again.
16
I asked Katherine to lunch at the little Thai restaurant in the basement of the psychology building. I ordered from the brusque woman, who could sometimes make eating there feel like a punishment despite how good the food was, and wandered out to sit in the courtyard while I waited for Katherine to arrive. It was a sunny, beautiful day. The kind of day I often took for granted living in a place where the beauty of the school, of nature, seemed to come so effortlessly. This was in stark contrast to my time on the East Coast, where beauty was hard won, where every brilliant day had to be savored, the memories of them stored like acorns buried underground by industrious squirrels, just to get you through those punishing winters. That first winter in Massachusetts, with snow piled up to my knees, I’d missed Alabama with an intensity I hadn’t thought possible. I craved heat and light the way other people craved coffee and cigarettes. Sick and sluggish, I got a SAD lamp from mental health services and sat staring at it for hours, hoping it would fool me into believing I was back in the place where I assume my ancestors first instilled this need for warmth—in Ghana on a beach just above the equator.
Katherine was half an hour late. I started eating and watched two undergrads argue in front of the bike stand across the way. It was clear they were a couple. One of the women circled her U-lock around her wrist while the other woman shouted, “I have a PSET due at three, Tiffany. You know that.” Tiffany didn’t seem to know, or maybe she just didn’t care. She was on her bike, zooming off within seconds, and the other woman just stood there, stunned. She looked around, trying to see if the fight had had any witnesses. I should have looked away, given her some privacy in her embarrassment, but I didn’t. We made eye contact, and her face grew so red I could almost feel the heat coming off of it. I smiled at her, but that only seemed to make her feel worse. I remembered what it was like to be that age, so aware of yourself and the theater of your private little shames. “I have my shit too,” I wanted to say. “I have worse shit than a PSET due at three, worse shit than Tiffany, even.” She narrowed her eyes at me as though she’d heard my thoughts, and then she stormed off.